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Research computing workshops coming to Simon Fraser University - March 18-21, 2019

February 22, 2019

A free workshop series is coming to Simon Fraser University (SFU) in March, co-hosted by SFU WestGrid. The sessions will provide hands-on introductions to essential tools and skills used in computational research. Researchers in all disciplines are invited to participate. No prior experience is required for any of the topics being covered. You can attend single sessions or the entire series, and these workshops are open to anyone -- researchers from other institutions and organizations outside of SFU are welcome to register.

There is...

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Next WestGrid Town Hall March 01: Managing System Instability

February 22, 2019

Join us Friday, March 1, for our first Community Town Hall of 2019.

This session will feature a special presentation on using large scale systems such as Cedar and will share some best practices to help users mitagate the risks of system instability.

Patrick Mann, WestGrid's Director of Operations, will also share the latest updates affecting advanced research computing users in Western Canada. Attendees are welcome to ask questions on these and any other topics and may join the session at any time.

Our...

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WestGrid Newsletter - February 2019

February 21, 2019

WestGrid's quarterly newsletter is now available to read online. If you would like to be added to the mailing list to receive WestGrid newsletters, sign up here.

Stories this month include:

  • A recap of WestGrid's2018 User Survey
  • An...
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2018 User Survey: The results are in!

February 19, 2019

Thank you to the more than 260 respondents who took the time to complete our third annual WestGrid User Survey last November. The purpose was to gather feedback on user and stakeholder satisfaction and to get a better understanding of your current and future research computing needs. 

We’re happy to share a snapshot of this years results in our 2018 User Survey Infographic.

...

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Cedar Downtime March 1-4

February 13, 2019

Cedar will be unavailable March 1 for required system software updates. Jobs with run times that would extend into March 1 will not be started prior to the outage, and any jobs still running by March 1 will be terminated. 

The system is planned to be back online by the end of the day, March 1, however, data on the /project filesystem will not be available until after March 4 in order to expand the /project filesystem. Therefore, researchers who want to run jobs on Cedar between March 2-4 must copy...

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WEBINAR Feb 20: Memory debugging with Valgrind

WestGrid webinar Valgrind Feb 2019
February 11, 2019

Join us for a one-hour webinar on Wednesday, February 20 for brief introduction to Valgrind, a system for debugging and profiling Linux programs. This online presentation is being hosted by Tyson Whitehead, an HPC Consultant with SHARCNET / University of Western Ontario.

Details

Memory debugging with Valgrind
Wednesday, February 20
10:00 - 11:00 am Pacific 
...

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WEBINAR Feb 06: Text parsing and matching with High Performance Computing resources

WestGrid webinar text parsing Feb 2019
January 28, 2019

Join us for a one-hour webinar on Wednesday, February 06 for brief introduction to some of the core concepts of analyzing text using computational tools.

We will use examples from social science research where multiple data sets refer to the same individuals and they need to be merged while accounting for deviations in how individuals are named or described.

This online presentation will be hosted by Ian Percel, a data scientist at the University of Calgary.

Details

Text parsing & matching...

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WestGrid launches Developer Support Competition - Accepting project proposals until Feb 28

January 25, 2019

Do you have an interesting project that could provide value to a research community but needs some technical expertise to implement? We want to work with you!

We have developer expertise to share with the research community and we’re looking specifically to support scientific gateways (also known as research platforms or portals).

Example potential project outcomes include (but are not limited to):

  • providing web-enabled access to large databases
  • providing links or access channels to HPC...
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Call for Proposals: CANHEIT-ARC 2019 seeking talks on tech, trends & innovations in research & Higher Ed

January 21, 2019

The CANHEIT-ARC 2019 conference, Canada’s premier conference for higher education IT leaders and advanced research computing (ARC) experts, is seeking session proposals in a range of topics in research and higher ed trends and technologies.

The event is co-hosted this year by Compute Canada, CUCCIO, the University of Manitoba, The University of Winnipeg, Brandon University, and St. Boniface University. WestGrid is also a partner. 

Submissions...

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December Town Hall recording and slides now available online

January 18, 2019

On Tuesday, December 18, WestGrid hosted a Community Town Hall with a special presentation from Jonathan Ferland, Compute Canada's Director of Information Security. He shared a summary of the Government of Canada's Top 10 Security Practices and how they apply to research data.

Other topics discussed at the Town Hall included:

  • some of the latest system activities and outages
  • early results from the 2018 WestGrid User Survey
  • winners of the 2018 Visualize This Challenge
  • upcoming training webinars...
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