Introductory HPC Workshop Series: Spring 2026
The Division of Information Technology (DIT) at the University of Maryland is pleased to announce the following workshop series for users of our High Performance Computing (HPC) resources.
There are only a limited number of seats available. Registration will remain open until all seats are filled.
| Introductory HPC Workshop Series | |
|---|---|
| Dates | Feb. 9 to May 4, 2026 (Mondays) |
| Times | 10:30 AM - 12:30 PM |
| Location | Brendan Iribe Center, Room 2207 |
| Instructor | Dr. Franz Klein Division of Information Technology, UMD |
| Cost | free |
| Registration Form | link to registration form |
| Registration Deadline | 8 February 2026 or when registration is full |
Overview
This workshop series is targeted at users of UMD's High Performance Computing cluster Zaratan and any member of the UMD community who is considering using high-performance or research computing facilities.
This course will introduce participants to the basics of high-performance computing (HPC), shell scripting and parallel computing and will cover to following topics:
| Date | Topic (subject to change) |
|---|---|
| Feb. 9 | HPC overview; access to Zaratan |
| Feb. 16 | Accessing Zaratan via the web portal |
| Feb. 23 | Accessing installed software and submitting jobs |
| Feb. 26 1:00-4:00 pm |
Related workshop (online): Parallel Computing with MATLAB (register here) |
| Mar. 2 | Unix/Linux shell scripting |
| Mar. 9 | Python packages and environments |
| Mar. 23 | Parallelizing Python code (multiprocessing, mpi4py, etc) |
| Mar. 30 | Deep-Learning workloads on multiple GPUs (Tensorflow, PyTorch, etc) |
| Apr. 6 | MATLAB Deep-Learning Toolkit |
| Apr. 13 | Research Software Engineering: data management, project planning and organization |
| Apr. 20 | Research Software Engineering: code quality, documentation, logging |
| Apr. 27 | Research Software Engineering: code review, testing, debugging |
| May 4 | Research Software Engineering: reproducibility, containerization |
Notes:
- Topics are subject to change, particularly participants may propose other topics to be covered.
- Most presentation will include example codes, which can be accessed by
participants via command line or web portal (on Zaratan under
$HOME/scratch.hpcintro-shared/) and may serve as templates for similar projects. - Zaratan's OpenOnDemand web portal offers unexperienced users an efficient way to accomplish most practical tasks; connection to UMD's VPN (GlobalProtect) is required to access the web portal.
- Using a Unix shell interactively or running shell scripts allows for using the full breath of the Linux/Unix operating system; Multi-Factor Authentication (MFA) is required unless you are connected to UMD's VPN (GlobalProtect).
Prerequisites
None. These are introductory workshops; no previous knowledge of high performance computing nor Unix/Linux is assumed.
System Requirements
These are bring-your-own-laptop events. Make sure that a terminal application (e.g. ssh or PuTTY) is installed. A modern web browser (on Windows preferably Firefox) and connection to UMD's GlobalProtect VPN are required for use of the OnDemand web portal. Please connect to the GlobalProtect VPN before the workshop sessions (instructions).
Miscellaneous Details
All participants who register by the deadline will
get a temporary HPC account on Zaratan and access to examples in
$HOME/scratch.hpcintro-shared.
Note
NOTE: DIT reserves the right to cancel the workshop for any reason with little notice.
If you have questions or need more information about the workshop, please feel free to contact us