Amazon Web Services Research Computing Immersion Day

The YCRC has partnered with the Amazon Web Services (AWS) team to provide training on essential Amazon Web Services for Research Computing.  Will St. Clair and Nick Ragusa, senior solutions architects from AWS, will lead a one-day training class.  Training wil be held in the YCRC auditorium and will focus on instruction during the morning session and hands on learning in the afternoon.

In this workshop you will be introduced to Jupyter Notebooks on AWS. Jupyter provides a user friendly and easy-to-use interactive programming environment in a web browser. Jupyter runs very well just about anywhere. You can run it on your laptop, your desktop machine, or in the AWS cloud. By running Jupyter Notebooks on AWS, you can take advantage of infrastructure web services you might not normally have access to. For example, using Jupyter on AWS you might want to use:

  • Large memory instances, e.g. up to 2TB RAM instances (x1 or r4 families)
  • Compute optimized instances, e.g. up to 36 vCPUs (c3 or c4 families)
  • NVIDIA GRID GPUs (g2 family)
  • NVIDIA K80 GPUs (p2 family)
  • Spark, Hadoop on Amazon Elastic MapReduce (EMR)
  • HPC clusters (AWS Batch and CfnCluster)

Essentially you can take advantage of any of the very powerful capabilities made available to you on AWS.

To successfully complete this lab, you should be familiar with the following:

  • Basic Amazon EC2 and AWS CloudFormation concepts
  • Basic familiarity with the Python and R programming languages
  • Basic familiarity with Git and Github.com

The training is free to the Yale Research Community and Lunch will be provided.

In preparation for the class, we are asking that attendees, who wish to participate in the hands-on lab, create an AWS account prior to attending.  Attendees will be provided promotional credit to apply to their AWS account. The exercises themselves will use a portion of that credit; participants are encouraged to use the remaining credit to experiment and learn on their own.

To create an account, visit the Amazon Web Services page and either create a new account or log in with your existing Amazon.com credentials. Note that all AWS accounts require a valid credit card, however, it will not be charged unless usage exceeds the promotional credit. Attendees will be instructed on how to terminate the resources they created during the lab. We recommend that those taking the lab not share accounts.

 

Current Sessions

Course Material 

  • To be provided after the session. 

 

If you have any questions, concerns or comments please contact the YCRC at research.computing@yale.edu.