High-performance computing isn’t just for physics, chemistry and math anymore.

“It’s expanding to almost any field,” explains Sergey Mashchenko, a senior research associate in both the department of physics and astronomy and McMaster’s research and high-performance computing support group. “Finance, social sciences, city planning, climate modelling – all those areas use super computers for their research.”

Mac recently hosted 134 undergraduate and graduate students, postdocs and researchers engaged in computer-intensive research from around the province to learn about high-performance computing over five days. The intensive courses and hands-on labs, part of the annual Ontario Summer School on Advanced Research Computing (ARC), covered a variety of subjects, including common programming languages, big data and deep learning, and cloud computing.

Participants who completed three of the five days of classes received an official certificate in ARC training.

The training is offered by the three high-performance computing consortia of Compute Ontario: SHARCNET, SciNet and the Centre for Advanced Computing. This is the fourth time since 2002 that McMaster has hosted the summer school, which has expanded from a single event in 2002 to three regional sessions, hosted by different universities throughout central, eastern and western Ontario.

The summer school is free to attend – and it’s getting more and more popular.

“Enrollment increased this year from last year, and we issued a record number of certificates,” explains Mashchenko, who teaches at all three regional sessions. “People know they need supercomputers for their research, and we want educated users.”