Planning HPC Python at HPC2N and UPPMAX

Materials pages

Dates spring 2026

None decided at the time of writing

See the course schedule

Course dates:

  • 2026-04-20

  • 2026-04-22

  • 2026-04-23

  • 2026-04-24

Meeting 2026-02-26 14.00

Present:

  • Birgitte

  • Björn

  • Jayant

  • Pedro

  • Richel

  • Sahar

  • Rebecca? Otherwise Sahar / Richel

Goals

  • Get on track

  • Go through evaluation

  • Identify needed changes (if time)

  • Available teachers

  • Advertise and registrations

Agenda

  • Teachers available (a list can be found below)

  • Evaluations

  • Changes

    • Sphinx –> Zensical

    • GitHub –> Gitlab?

      • Can learners make issues?

      • Would it work if the repo is private for us?

        • No! We need it for, e.g. downloading tarballs, allowing learners to submit a PR, etc.

    • big picture

  • Advertise and registrations

Teachers available

  • 2026-04-20: Day 1: Richel

  • 2026-04-22: Day 2: Richel’s sessions go to Björn, Björn, Birgitte, Jayant, (Sahar)

  • 2026-04-23: Day 3: ?Rebecca, Sahar as backup for Rebecca’s sessions, Björn, Birgitte, Sahar

  • 2026-04-24: Day 4: Birgitte, Jayant, Pedro

Misc:

  • Birgitte will ask Joachim for status of Rebecca at the coordination meeting

Evaluations

Overall

  • Very few answered: 4-5

  • want more about COSMOS-SENS because little documentation at LUNARC

  • practical management of Conda/virtual environments on HPC: we can attempt to put it back in

  • Workflow systems like NextFlow or Snakemake: this is other courses

  • I guess that Python, pandas, matplotlib and such could be prerequisites to the course and instead only focus on big data and HPC specifics

    • The order is right: Day 1 teaches Python needed for Day 2, the Day 3 morning teaches the prerequisites for its afternoon

    • We keep it as it is!

  • The material is good, but the teaching technique is lacking.

    • Richel started off very good with a lot of interaction, breakout rooms and time for questions and doing things yourself.

      • Teachers decide on how to teach, as per usual

    • I liked this and that the exercises were part of the teaching, not meant to do during breaks, then you would never get breaks

      • There is the intention to add more time for exercises

Day 1

  • Day 1 had 3 responses (38% fill-in rate)

  • Success score: 90%

  • Comments:

    • It’s very nice to be able to through everything at your own pace, and still receive help/feedback on where you are, independent of the rest of the group.

    • The instructor was so helpful and friendly and helped me a lot in learning new stuff and solving issues I had during the day

    • Great teaching!

    • Great work with creating engagement

Day 2

  • Numbers answering: 4

  • Success score: 82%

  • Best confidence: Find & load / Install Python packages

  • Lowest: Check if in interactive session

    • This session is low on time (as is also mentioned by the learners)

    • There needs to be taught too much different ways

    • May fix itself when we have Arrhenius in the future

    • Working group decides on how to split the time up better and will schedule a meeting: BC, BB, JY, (RP)

  • Comments:

    • Exercises were a bit less clear today, which ones we should do and when was a little confusing.

    • Because each HPC has different setup it is a bit uninteresting to walk through them all when I’m only concerned with the one I’m using

      • We feel we are doing this more already

    • a little bit tight

    • The time allocated isolated environments and launching IDEs from the command line did not seem adequate

    • I and some other seemed to be lost already at OnDemand, and interactive work.

      • So maybe you should make that session more interactive. Then it would have been easier to follow the other sessions after that.

Day 3

  • Numbers answering: 5

  • Success score: 66%

  • Best confidence: Create plots in matplotlib

  • Lowest: Create plots in Seaborn

    • May be a leftover from incomplete discussion on IDEs

  • Comments:

    • when you get stuck in setting things up you then also loose on the learning

    • Overall a good setup of the course! It is hard to do the exercises because environments etc. has to be set, so I will have to go back later to finish.

    • Demonstrating everything with actual code and a more hands-on approach would be essential to better understand the core concepts.

Day 4

  • Numbers answering: 4

  • Success score: 52%

  • Best confidence: Multiprocessing

  • Lowest: Determine which ML/DL modules are installed at centre

    • BC will try to make this better

  • We will have InfraViz around again next time

  • Comments

    • a bit too fast for me to really learn by following examples, too uncertain with setting up environments, connecting etc

      • People jump in on only Day 4, where the prerequisites (e.g. connecting) are taught earlier

      • Suggest: for each day, have a link to the requirements of that day

      • Maybe connection session in the morning? No, we tried this and nobody showed up.

    • more on basic usage with nodes, set up Jupyter, environments, loading modules

      • We assume he/she did not follow the earlier days …

Changes

  • Sphinx –> Zensical

    • Let’s wait until the other courses have moved on, as there is also a GitHub –> GitLab move

  • GitHub –> GitLab

    • Let’s wait until the other courses have moved on, as there is also a Sphinx –> Zensical move

  • Big picture changes in lessons?

Notes from previous meeting