Available courses

2022 CHPC Student Cluster Competition

The CHPC Student Cluster Competition gives undergraduate students at South African universities exposure to the High Performance Computing (HPC) Industry. At the CHPC's 2022 National Meeting teams build small HPC clusters on the exhibition floor from hardware provided by the CHPC and our industrial partners. The winning team, from the (in-person) competition is entered into the ISC Student Cluster Competition hosted at the 2023 International Supercomputing Conference in Germany.

For more information or to register for the competition you can apply here.


Student Cluster Competition 2021 Selection Round

The CHPC Student Cluster Competition gives undergraduate students at South African universities exposure to the High Performance Computing (HPC) Industry. At the CHPC's 2021 National Meeting teams build small HPC clusters on the exhibition floor from hardware provided by the CHPC and our industrial partners. The winning team is entered into the ISC Student Cluster Competition hosted at the 2022 International Supercomputing Conference in Germany.

For more information or to register for the competition you can apply here.

CHPC - DARA Linux and Python Training Partnership

The CHPC will be conducting a full-week virtual computer training to selected students of Development in Africa Radio Astronomy (DARA) project within SKA specified partner countries. In particular, Botswana, Kenya, Ghana, Madagascar, Mozambique, Namibia and Zambia, respectively. Students background is in natural science (e.g. Physics, Mathematics, Statistics etc). The computer syllabus covers a week on introduction to Linux and bash scripting, and the other week on Python programming for Science and Engineering. It is a requirement that selected DARA students must attend this computer training before they can do anything related to radio Astronomy. The training utilises the existing clusters of PCs that have been delivered by DARA and African VLBI Network, all of which have the same Linux set-up and Astronomy software on them installed by HartRAO.

CHPC Linux and HPC course for CGS

This course is offered by the CHPC to employees of the Council for Geosciences in order to assist them in making full use of the computational resources available to them via the CHPC. The course will begin with a basic introduction to the command-line Linux environment, bash and bash scripting. The underlying principles of HPC and parallel computing will then be explained, as well as such HPC-related concepts as the job-scheduler. Practical use of of the CHPC's cluster will then be explained through examples, tutorials and exercises.

2021 CHPC Introductory Programming Summer School

The Summer School is jointly organised by the Centre for High Performance Computing (CHPC) of the Council of Scientific and Industrial Research and the National Institute for Theoretical  Computational Science (NITheP).

The School will start with a Basic Scientific Programming Course to introduce students to Linux (Ubuntu) Command line and bash scripting and the Python programming Language.

To enrol complete the application form.



Introduction to High Performance Computing 2019

An introduction to high performance computing (HPC) for users and potential users of the CHPC systems. The online course will culminate with the hands-on Winter School, 1-6 July 2019, Pretoria.

2018 Introduction to High Performance Computing

Practical HPC 2023 Winter School

A two week introduction to effective and practical HPC for users of the CHPC.  Topics are:

  1. Workflow to Job Script
  2. Installing software
  3. Scaling

Practical HPC 2022 Winter School

A two week introduction to effective and practical HPC for users of the CHPC.  Topics are:

  1. Workflow to Job Script
  2. Scaling

2022 CHPC Coding Summer School

The Summer School is jointly organised by the Centre for High Performance Computing (CHPC) of the Council of Scientific and Industrial Research and the National Institute for Theoretical and Computational Sciences (NITheCS).

The School will start with a Basic Scientific Programming Course to introduce students to Linux (Ubuntu) Command line and bash scripting and the Python programming Language.

To enrol complete the application form.



Practical HPC 2021 CHPC Winter School

This online course will introduce African HPC users to the systems at the CHPC and help you develop practical skills in using the cluster for your scientific work. Attendees will learn the basics of using the CHPC Lengau cluster along with how to convert the computational intensive parts of their scientific workflow into a job script suitable for the CHPC. The Practical HPC course is 10 weeks long and will need about 2~3 hours per week.

For more information and to enrol in this course apply here.


Practical HPC 2020 CHPC Winter School

This online course will introduce African HPC users to the systems at the CHPC and help you develop practical skills in using the cluster for your scientific work. Attendees will learn the basics of using the CHPC Lengau cluster along with how to convert the computational intensive parts of their scientific workflow into a job script suitable for the CHPC. The Practical HPC course is 10 weeks long and will need about 2~3 hours per week.

For more information and to enrol in this course apply here.


Monthly Coding Challenge

The Monthly Coding Challenge is an extension of the Coding Summer School to continue the learning experience of students and prepare them for the CHPC Winter School.