Working Hard to Increase Training

This has been an exciting semester for training at iCER! Thus far, iCER has offered a dozen hands-on workshops for researchers. Workshops ranged from multi-day domain specific training in mothur for sequence analysis and computational chemoinformatics, to basic training in the Linux command line, high performance computing (HPC), parallel programming languages, MATLAB, and Python. Workshop participants included faculty, staff and graduate students from over 5 colleges, over 26 departments and domains ranging from Engineering and Life Sciences to Social Sciences. In all, approximately 200 MSU researchers have participated in iCER training this semester.

In September, we kicked off the semester with a "Software Carpentry Workshop" giving participants with little to no command line/programming experience a hands-on introduction to: organizing and accessing data from the terminal, working with and visualizing data using iPython Notebook and using Git for data management.

iCER partnered with Dr. Tracy Teal, MSU Assistant Professor, BEACON Center for the Study of Evolution in Action and Data Carpentry Lead, in October to offer a hands-on experience "Analyzing Amplicon Sequence Data with mothur" where participants where invited to ask questions about their research data.

Furthermore, iCER worked with Dr. Mike Colaresi, MSU Professor of Political Science, and the Social Science Data Analytics Initiative to provide a workshop series on "Data Analytics Tools for Social Scientists". The first workshop in this series provided a hands-on introduction to the command line and HPC. A subsequent workshop (scheduled for November) will provide an introduction to using Python for text scraping.

During the third annual Cyberinfrastructure (CI) Days, a full day of introductory and advanced courses were offered in HPC, Python and MATLAB. Around 100 participants attended these workshops and the feedback from those present was positive.

Researchers took advantage of several opportunities to build their skills in parallel programing through XSEDE OpenMP and MPI workshops as well as a "CUDA Optimization Techniques Webinar" presented by GPU Technology Conference.

In November, Dr. Andy Zhong, visiting faculty in Computational Chemistry, taught a 4-day "Computational Chemoinformatics and Docking Studies" workshop where participants were introduced to molecular modeling with MOE software.

With a very full fall training schedule soon coming to a close, there are plans to continue offering a wide variety of workshops, seminars, lectures, and webinars. As December approaches, iCER plans to host an RNAseq workshop as well as an XSEDE Open ACC workshop. In addition, we are currently scheduling training for the spring semester and would like to encourage faculty and users to take this opportunity to discuss their training needs. To make an appointment to submit a request for training or discuss your training needs, please complete an iCER Contact Form.

A complete list of upcoming trainings can be found on our events page.