June 2026 / Intro to Scientific Computing / HPC Summer Kickstart

Quick links

Kickstart: Introduction to HPC and Scientific Computing

Kickstart is a three half-day course for researchers and students who want to get started with high-performance computing (HPC) and scientific computing workflows.

  • Day 1 (Wed 3 June): focuses on the basics of HPC through practical examples. You will learn how to connect to a supercomputer, how storage choices affect your workflow, how to transfer data, and run your first jobs with slurm.

  • Day 2 (Thu 4 June) introduces tools and practices for efficient and responsible data science. Topics include Conda environments, batch and array jobs, job monitoring, software modules, parallel computing

  • Day 3 (Fri 5 June) covers more advanced topics: GPU usage, working with real examples: local open-weights LLMs (large language models).

By the end of the course, you will be ready to use HPC clusters effectively with hands-on skills and ready-made examples.

If you are at Aalto University: the course is obligatory for all new Triton users and recommended to all interested in the field.

This course is part of Scientific Computing in Practice lecture series at Aalto University, supported by many others outside Aalto, and offered to others as part of CodeRefinery.

Schedule

Subject to change

Schedule may still have updates before the course, and also during as we adapt to audience questions and interests.

Times automatically converted to:

  • Day 1 (Wed 3 June)

    • : Joining time/icebreaker

    • Introduction, about the course Materials: SciComp kickstart intro (Enrico Glerean, Richard Darst, Thomas Pfau )

    • The HPC Kitchen (RD, TP)

    • Connecting to the cluster (TP, SM)

    • Break

    • CSC resources for scientific computing (tbc)

      • A special guest from CSC will talk about our national supercomputers Mahti/Puhti/LUMI and how to use them in practice.

    • End of day

  • Day 2 (Thu 4 June)

    • Connecting, icebreakers, Q&A

    • Setting up for a new project (RD, Simo Tuomisto)

    • What is Slurm? (ST, RD)

    • Break

    • Interactive jobs (RD, ST)

      • Interactive jobs - Exercise Interactive-2

      • Big example: Project Gutenburg n-gram analysis

    • First serial jobs (RD, ST)

      • Serial Jobs - Exercise Serial-2

      • Big example: Project Gutenburg n-gram analysis

    • : Lunch break

    • Behind the scenes: the humans of scientific computing (RD, Susanne Merz)

      • Who are we that teach this course and provide SciComp support? What makes it such a fascinating career? Learn about what goes on behind the scenes and how you could join us.

    • Conda (SM, Jarno Rantaharju)

    • Break

    • Array jobs (ST, RD)

    • End of day

  • Day 3 (Fri 5 June)

    • Connecting, icebreaker, Q&A

    • Monitoring (ST, RD)

    • Applications (RD, ST)

    • Research integrity, security, compliance, and reproducibility (EG, TP)

    • Break

    • Parallel (ST, RD)

    • : Lunch break

    • How to ask for help with (super)computers (RD, )

      • It’s dangerous to go alone, take us! Don’t waste time struggling, there are plenty of people here for you. Materials: Slides.

    • GPUs (ST, HF)

    • Break

    • LLM example (ST, HF)

    • Wrap up and summary, ask us anything

    • End of course

Practical information

This is a livestream course with distributed exercise and support. Everyone may attend the livestream at https://twitch.tv/coderefinery, no registration needed, and this is the primary way to watch all sessions. There is constant Q&A via shared notes.

Time, date: 3 – 5 June 2026 (Wed–Fri). Day 1: 13:00-15:00 EEST. Days 2-3: 10:00-12:00 EEST and 13:00-15:00 EEST.

Place: Online via public livestream, Zoom exercise sessions for partners.

Registration: TBA. It’s OK to register and attend only individual sessions.

Cost: Livestream is free to everyone.

Additional course info at: scip@aalto.fi

Credits and certificates

It is possible to get 1 ECTS with some extra homework. Those of you at Aalto University will need to add SCI-L1010 to your study plan and submit the homework in MyCourses. If you are not at Aalto University, more instructions will appear here during the course days. Please note that in some universities our certificate is not valid for Master studies. So please do check in advance with your study coordinator. Doctoral students should not have any issue in registering the credit at their university.

Other organizations

If you are not at Aalto University, you can follow along and probably learn a lot. We design the course to be useful even to others outside of Aalto University, but some of the examples won’t directly work on your cluster (most will, anyway we will give hints about adapting). How to register if you are not at Aalto:

  • Regardless of where you are from, you may use the primary registration form (TBA) to get emails about the course. You don’t get anything else.

  • Participants from University of Helsinki can follow how to connect to their Kale/Turso cluster by following their own instructions.

  • Participants from University of Oulu: please follow instructions on how to access the Lehmus computing cluster.

  • Tampere: this course is recommended for all new Narvi users and also all interested in HPC. Most things should work with simply replacing triton -> narvi. Some differences in configuration are listed in Narvi differences

  • CSC (Finland): Participants with CSC user account can try examples also in CSC supercomputers, see the overview of CSC supercomputers for details on connecting, etc.

If you want to get your site listed here and/or help out, contact us via the CodeRefinery chat (#kickstart-aalto stream). We have docs for other sites’ staff to know what might be different between our course and your cluster.

Preparation

We strongly recommend you are familiar with the Linux command line. Browsing the following material is sufficient:

Technical prerequisites

Software installation

  • SSH client to connect to the cluster (+ be able to connect, see next point)

  • Zoom (if attending breakout rooms)

Cluster account and connection verification:

  • Access to your computer cluster.

    • Aalto: if you do not yet have access to Triton, request an account in advance. Others: Access to your computing cluster.

    • Attempt to Connect to your cluster (don’t worry, we will also go over this on day 1 anyway).

Next steps / follow-up courses

Keep the Triton quick reference close (or equivalent for your cluster), or print this cheatsheet if that’s your thing.

Each year the first day has varying topics presented. We don’t repeat these every year, but we strongly recommend that you watch some of these videos yourself as preparation.

Very strongly recommended:

Other useful material in previous versions of this course:

While not an official part of this course, we suggest these videos (co-produced by our staff) as a follow-up perspective:

Community standards

We hope to make a good learning environment for everyone, and expect everyone to do their part for this. If there is anything we can do to support that, let us know.

If there is anything wrong, tell us right away - if you need to contact us privately, you can message the host on Zoom or contact us outside the course. This could be as simple as “speak louder / text on screen is unreadable / go slower” or as complex as “someone is distracting our group by discussing too advanced things”.

Material

See the schedule