Hands-On 2015 - Second Hands-On Workshop on Leveraging High Performance Computing Resources for Managing Large Datasets

The possibilities of making unprecedented discoveries through data-driven and data-intensive research are based on the existence of reusable, sustainable, accessible, organized and documented Big Data collections. For this reason, data management has taken a center stage in research practices across diverse domains. Even though it is clear that scalable resources and data management workflows are required to attain curated collections in a timely manner, there are significant knowledge barriers in using such scalable high-end resources. This hands-on workshop will (1) introduce the audience to scalable High Performance Computing (HPC) and high-end storage resources, and will (2) provide experience in setting their data management workflows on these resources.
The main target audience of this workshop is researchers, data curators, data managers, librarians and archivists who are in charge of lifecycle management, long-term preservation, and access of data. The key topics that will be covered during the workshop are: TACC resources, data transfer, data integrity, metadata extraction, file-migration, quality control, data classification and reorganization, and data preservation.
Texas Advanced Computing Center (TACC) resources will be used for the hands-on exercises. Participants are not required to have prior knowledge about HPC and will be provided accounts for accessing TACC resources during the workshop. Details regarding the usage of Stampede* for the exercises covered during the workshop will be provided at a later date. In order to participate in the hands-on exercises, the workshop participants might want to bring their own laptop with the SSH Shell Client or Terminal available. The Windows OS users might find the instructions in this short video useful for installing and testing an SSH Shell Client on their laptop. The OS/X users should be able to SSH through the "Terminal" application that is already available on their laptop and are not required to do any installations. In addition to TACC resources, the computational and storage resources at the National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center (NERSC) will also be accessible to the workshop participants.