The Research Computing Center (RCC) offers high-end computational resources that make possible new forms of humanistic and social science research. As the diverse fields aligned with digital media and digital data sources continue to grow, researchers in the social sciences and the humanities are now regularly employing algorithms, tools and computing platforms to rapidly and systematically process and analyze textual corpora of all types and sizes, to analyze social and linguistic networks, to explore digital imagery, to create complex and interactive data visualizations, and to extract data from a wide variety of archival sources.

This introductory workshop is designed to welcome you to basic mechanisms and toolkits for computing as well as provide an introduction to working with large datasets on university computational resources. We will guide you through these shared resources (open access and free to all) to unveil the potential that computing can bring to research outcomes in the humanities and social sciences. We will explain how to utilize storage allocations and service units within the HPC cluster. We will further highlight how to get an account, log in to the system, upload data, schedule jobs, download research results and monitor your usage and your account.

The goal of this workshop is to reveal the potential and impart the basic skills and knowledge needed to use university computational resources to a general audience, even those with little or no background in computing.

Objectives:

Participants will gain a basic understanding of the university computational resources provided by and via the RCC
Participants will learn how to get an account and access, utilize, and move data to and from computational resources
Participants will learn how to work interactively with large datasets
Participants will learn how to schedule jobs
Participants will learn how to monitor their jobs and their usage

Level: Introductory

Duration: 1 hour

Prerequisites: None. Attendees should bring a laptop if they would like to participate in the hands-on exercises. An RCC account is helpful but not required.

Introduction to the RCC and Computational Resources