CSC for Education


For Students

    Students can take the various courses offered at CSC and learn about the fundamentals of utilizing modern computing environments. These courses help students understand the trends in computing technologies and how they are being utilized in the industry. Students have the possibility of using the computing resources at CSC for their thesis work.

For Teachers

    Teachers can use some of the services provided by CSC to host their course exercises. For example, the CSC Notebook and the Puhti OnDemand services can be used to teach students programming, analysis, and modeling related courses. If teachers and educational institutions would like to develop and host their own custom educational platforms, they can use CSC's platforms such as Rahti and Pouta.

For Researchers

    Researchers have traditionally been using the CSC computing resources for running their experiments. In addition to that, researchers can also use CSC's services and resources to host their short courses and practical workshops. Such practices increase the researchers visibility and boost their networks.

For Other Staff

    Department heads and management staff can use some of the template resources provided or their own recipes to deploy custom monitoring and presentation platforms. These, for example, include wordpress deployments for department and project landing pages, and templates for deploying user engagement monitoring platforms.

CSC for Courses

CSC already provides the following self study and guided courses. The following table lists some of the courses available. A full list of courses provided at CSC can be found here.

 

Course Description Resources
Introduction to Python An introductory python course. Provides a Jupyter programming environment with support for the Python programming language.
  • Introductory self study lectures and course instructions.
  •  Notebook based practice examples, and exercises. 
Practical Deep Learning A course on Practical Deep Learning. Provides a Jupyter programming environment with Python deep learning libraries.
  • Self study materials, Lecture slides, and instructions. 
  • Notebook based Practical examples and exercises.
  • A Guided course session runs at least on a yearly basis.
Practical Machine Learning  A course on Practical Machine Learning. Provides a Jupyter programming environment with Python machine learning libraries.
  • Self study materials, Lecture  slides, and instructions
  • Notebook based Practical examples and exercises.
  • A Guided course session runs at least on a yearly basis.
Introduction to R A beginner course on the R programming language. Provides Jupyter programming environment with support for the R programming language.
  • Self study materials, Lecture  slides, and instructions
  • Notebook based Practical examples and exercises.
  • A Guided course session runs at least on a yearly basis.

Elements of Supercomputing

An online course open for everyone interested in supercomputers and high performance computing.
  • Self study materials, Lecture  slides, and instructions
  • Practical examples and exercises of one of CSC’s supercomputers.
  • A Guided course session runs at least on a yearly basis.

 

CSC Services and Platforms for Education


Besides consuming the self study and guided courses provided by CSC, institutions can host their own courses using CSC platforms such as Notebooks and OOD. Additionally, they can bring their own recipes for their customized educational platforms and deploy them on to one of the core infrastructures such as Pouta and Rahti that provide row compute and storage resources. The following table lists the most important CSC platforms that are suitable for educational use.

Platform Description  Resources
Notebooks A web-based interactive computational environment for creating notebook documents, which can contain a set of cells with code, text, plots, etc. Notebooks mainly provide an interactive development, where code is written and run in the same document as its results are visualized and explained.
  • Workspaces for collaborative group works, hosting full courses, and course exercises. 
  • Preconfigured courses that can be included in university courses or be used as additional resources alongside own courses.
OOD Provides a web-based user interface to one of CSC’s supercomputers, Puhti. It mainly provides familiar tools such as Matlab and Notebooks through a web-based easy to use interface. As these applications will run on Puhti itself, users can get access to GPUs and multi-core CPUs to run their experiments. 
  • GPU-enabled Notebooks for courses, workshops, and collaborative research 
  • Visual Code Studio for developing code online, and on the supercomputer Puhti itself. Can be useful for hosting course exercises.
  • Matlab and Rstudio for modeling and analysis directly on the super computer Puhti. Can be a good additional resource to courses that need these tools. 
Rahti Rahti is a container cloud platform which provides scalable computing resources in the form of containers and scalable storage resources in the form of volumes that can be attached to the containers. It also provides a catalog of templates for deploying some commonly used cloud based applications such as Wordpress, Notebooks, and etc.
  • Templates that can be used to deploy various platforms related to course material presentations, exercises, and 
  • Scalable compute and storage resources for departments and teachers that would like to run their own course platform  
Pouta An infrastructure as a service platform that provides traditional virtual machines and storage volumes. Provides infrastructure for departments and teachers that want to develop customized educational platforms.