Time to buy that new lunch box

The Georgetown University Advanced Research Computing (ARC) has updated the training schedule. In case you hvae not noticed, the ARC division has created a certification program for computer systems administrators wanting to advance in the field of high performance and high throughput computing.

The Systems Administration Certification program consists of two required courses and a series of 1-3 day elective courses. The four-day Introduction to High Performance Computing is the required entry point to the program. Students with strong UNIX/Linux administration skills will complete this course able to plan, design, build, benchmark, and administer a Beowulf cluster. The current schedule is as follows:

• August 4-6, 2008 Intermediate Beowulf: An Introduction to Benchmarking and Tuning (Shameless Plug: Taught by yours truly)
• September 16-19, 2008 Introduction to Beowulf Design, Planning, Building and Administering
• October 21-23, 2008 Intermediate Sun Grid Engine Configuration and Administration
• January 26-29, 2009 Introduction to Beowulf Design, Planning, Building and Administering
• March 10-12, 2009 Introduction to Programming Accelerators and Coprocessors

More information can be found here. A few notes are worth mentioning.

The Intermediate Sun Grid Engine class will not go into as much detail as the Advanced class taught previously, though it will cover many advanced topics. The students will build a fairly complex, working environment by the end of the course. The course description will be posted shortly.

In March they will be offering a class on Programming Accelerators and Coprocessors. It will be taught by John Leidel and most likely use GPUs with either Nvidia CUDA or AMD/ATI Stream Computing "languages," and RapidMind software. We are still working out the details.

The ARC is contemplating a course in cluster storage (Lustre, pNFS, GlusterFS, etc.). Would this be interesting or useful? Are there other courses that you would find useful? We will probably also hold a Maui/Torque class in the future. Contact Jess Cannata at Georgetown - jac67(you know what goes here)georgetown(and here)edu.