April 20, 2018 - by CSCS
Researchers in data science, analytics and artificial intelligence are increasingly seeing the need for incorporating supercomputing resources in their workflows. The challenge for supercomputing centres is providing the right tools and interfaces to the data science community.
Container technologies such as Docker and Shifter (a container deployment for HPC environments) provide the possibility for users or third parties to create and support workloads that are able to run efficiently and easily on platforms ranging from laptops to HPC centers to commercial elastic cloud providers. Containers provide advantages with respect to portability and reproducibility; data science applications are particularly amenable to containerization as they tend to involve very complex software stacks composed of anything from Python to GPU-enabled code, often with many, version-specific, software dependencies.
The focus of this workshop is data science applications and containerization. You will learn how to create and run your own container images, and how to make use of containers that are provided by third parties such as CSCS, Cray Inc., or NVIDIA.
A significant portion of the workshop will be dedicated to a hands-on exploration of Cray’s Urika-XC, which is an integrated suite of advanced analytics, AI, deep learning applications and graph tools that are optimized for the Cray XC platform and based on Shifter containers. Exercises will involve the use of interactive Jupyter notebooks. Familiarity with Cray systems is not a prerequisite for this course.
This two and a half day workshop will be of interest to data scientists who are already using – or are interested in exploring the use of – containerization to facilitate their workflows, as well as those who are interested in learning about novel data analytics tools and interfaces available at CSCS. All course attendees will be given the opportunity to present their use cases, experiences and expectations. Attendees will be able to test and deploy their workflows with the assistance of experts from Cray and CSCS.
The workshop will take place from June 13 to 15, 2018 in the ML building of ETH Zurich in the meeting room ML H 37.1.
More information, the agenda and the registration portal can be find on the event page.