Training Material

This section of the UNIVERSE-HPC website provides access to our collated training materials and learning pathway structures. The materials here are targeted at both trainers / course developers and individuals who are keen to develop their skills through self-learning. Below you can find a table of our current courses and modules. You can also find details aimed at training material developers and course organisers about how the material is built and how to deploy your own version of the reference course website.

Pathway structures can be viewed via a series of interactive graphs accessible via the course links in the table below and via the course material section of the “Gutenberg” course website.

Course Material

All the material is hosted here written in GitHub Flavored Markdown with a few custom directives to indicate callouts, problem and solution blocks. Each section also has its own metadata header section in YAML, which contains information on the name and dependencies of each section, as well as the attribution information for that section of material. The format is described in more detail in CONTRIBUTING.md.

Course website

To render the material in a form suitable for running courses, we have written a website called Gutenberg. You can see an example deployment of this website by Oxford Research Software Engineering (OxRSE) here. The website renders the material as static webpages, but also has a database and backend for hosting course “events”. Events are composed of a linear series of modules along with timing and location information and pointers to material. Students can enrol on courses, and tick off problems as they complete them, enabling instructors to track progress. Students can also comment directly on the material in order to obtain asynchronous, remote feedback from other students and instructors if required.

Courses and Modules

Course	Module	Description
Software Architecture and Design	Procedural Programming	Procedural Programming is based around the idea that code should be structured into a sequence of procedures that operate on data. This module will introduce you to the basics of procedural programming in either Python or C++.
	Object-Orientated Programming	The Object Oriented Paradigm builds upon the Procedural Paradigm, but builds code around data and the structure of the problem being solved. This module will introduce you to the basics of Object Oriented Programming in either Python or C++.
	Functional Programming	Functional Programming is based around the idea that programs are constructed by applying and composing/chaining functions. This module will introduce you to the basics of functional programming in either Python or C++.
Technology and Tooling	The Bash shell	The Bash shell is a command-line interface used in Unix-based operating systems such as Linux and macOS. This module will introduce you to the basics of using the Bash shell.
	Version Control	This module introduces the basics of software version control using the Git version control system. We will learn how to set up Git, and use it to track changes in our code.
	Packaging and Dependency Management	This module introduces the basics of packaging and dependency management in Python and C++. For Python, we introduce venv for virtual environments, and pip for package management and how to structure a modern Python package and publish it to PyPI. For C++, we introduce the CMake build system and how to use it to manage dependencies and the build process.
	Best Practices	This module covers how to style your Python code, and use linters to enforce a consistent style and highlight any code that can lead to commonly encountered bugs or problems.
	IDEs	Integrated Development Environments (IDEs) provide programmers with a complete development environment to write, edit, debug, and deploy their code. This module introduces the popular VSCode IDE, both for Python and C++ development.
	Testing	This module introduces the basics of automated testing and debugging in Python, using the Pytest framework.
	Containerisation with Docker	This module aims to introduce the use of Docker containers with the goal of using them to effect reproducible computational environments.
	Snakemake Tutorial	This tutorial introduces the text-based workflow system Snakemake.
Software Project Management	Collaboration on GitHub	This module will show you how to use Git for effective collaboration with others using the GitHub platform. After completion of the module, you will be able to contribute to projects on GitHub, including opening issues and pull requests.
	Continuous Integration	This module introduces the concept of Continuous Integration (CI) and how to set it up for a Python project using GitHub Actions.
High Performance Computing	Introduction to High Performance Computing	An introduction to high-performance computing (HPC), covering connecting to HPC resources and the Slurm job scheduler.
	HPC Scalability Profiling	This session introduces the concept of scalability and how to profile the scalability of your code with an increasing number of cores.
Introductory Courses	Intro to Python	This course introduces the basics of programming in Python. We will learn how to run Python code, and how to use variables, functions, and control flow. We will also learn how to use Python for data analysis and visualization.