2023 COSS Data Security

Be aware. Stay secure. Join us to learn more about the tools you can use to prevent the theft of your data and possibly of your identity. Other topics of discussion will include common hacking attempts, how to recognize them, and how to avoid having your data compromised, stolen, or destroyed. We will also talk about data encryption and provide tips for when travelling with electronic devices. (This course will be taught in English.)

This workshop will be delivered online in one session:

  • June 12 from 9:00 A.M. to 12:00 P.M. (Eastern Daylight Time)

Soyez futés. Pensez sécurité. Joignez-vous à nous pour en savoir plus sur les outils à utiliser pour prévenir le vol des données et possiblement de votre identité. Nous aborderons les tentatives de piratage, comment les reconnaître et éviter la compromission ou le vol des données. Nous discuterons aussi du chiffrement des données et les conseils à observer lors du voyage avec des appareils électroniques. (Le contenu du ce cours vous sera présenté en anglais seulement, mais questions en français sont bienvenues)

Ce cours sera présenté enligne en 1 session:

  • Le 25 juin 2023 de 9h00 à 12h00 HAE

2023 COSS Research Data Management and HPC: Moving Toward Shared Best Practices

Increasingly, academics are turning to high performance computing (HPC) to achieve their research goals, with evidence from the literature suggesting that data management efforts in HPC-based research tend to focus primarily on reproducibility.  This presentation will explore best practices for reproducibility in HPC-based workflows and how they intersect with and complement the broader need for good research data management. This presentation draws from a variety of sources to (i) contextualize this problem, (ii) spark discussion of RDM best practices, and (iii) identify areas in need of further attention. The overarching goal is to seed the development of practical training, support materials, and approaches that can be tailored to help researchers, HPC-support professionals, and Data Librarians/Specialists make data emerging from HPC-based research FAIR: Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, and Reusable.

This presentation will occur on June 12 from 1:30 P.M. to 2:50 P.M. Eastern Daylight Time.

2023 COSS Introduction to Borealis, Odesi, and Geoportal

The reproducibility of research is essential to the scientific community, as it ensures that research findings are reliable and can be used to build upon existing knowledge. However, reproducibility is often hindered by the lack of access to research data, documentation, and code. This workshop will address these issues by providing an introduction to repositories and tools to discover, access, reuse, deposit, and share research data, documentation, and code.

The workshop will cover a range of topics, including:

  • Discover, access, and reuse Canadian research data using Borealis (https://borealisdata.ca), ODESI (https://odesi.ca), and Scholars GeoPortal (https://odesi.ca)
  • Deposit and share research data, documentation, and code in Borealis
  • Explore new integrations to support reproducibility and computational workflows

Participants will have the opportunity to search and access sample datasets and code, with a focus on real world examples and use cases. Participants will explore Borealis features and integrations to support reproducibility, including uploading data from GitHub. By the end of the workshop, participants will have gained skills and knowledge related to accessing, reusing, depositing, and sharing research data and code with an emphasis on openness and reproducibility, improving the quality and impact of their research.


This presentation will occur on June 12 from 3:00 P.M. to 4:30 P.M. Eastern Daylight Time.

2023 COSS Research Data About People- New Policy and New Opportunities

This session is about data involving humans, and related research ethics and research data management considerations. It has three parts:

  1. an introduction to research ethics considerations related to sensitive data;
  2. an overview of recent changes to the Tri-Council Policy Statement: Ethical Conduct for Research Involving Humans (2022) concerning research data and data repositories; and
  3. an overview of an Alliance-led initiative that will provide new opportunities for innovating management of sensitive research data.
Researchers, service providers, and staff who work with human-participant data will benefit by learning about recent policy changes that relate to their work, by engaging their knowledge, and by keeping up-to-date on new opportunities.

This presentation will occur on June 13 from 9:00 A.M. to 10:20 A.M. Eastern Daylight Time.

2023 COSS Safe Sharing for Sensitive Data

This workshop is intended to provide an accessible and practical introduction to the theory and concepts behind data anonymization. Topics covered will include an overview of identifiers and quasi-identifiers, an introduction to k-anonymity, a look at some cases where k-anonymity breaks down, and anonymization hierarchies. The presenter will explain how to assess a simple dataset for anonymization using standard statistical software. Much of the academic material looking at data anonymization is quite abstract and aimed at computer scientists, while material aimed at data curators does not always consider recent developments. This webinar is intended to help bridge the gap.

This presentation will occur on June 13 from 10:30 A.M. to 12:00 P.M. Eastern Daylight Time.

2023 COSS Introduction to Alliance RDM Services

This session provides an overview of the Research Data Management (RDM) Services offered by the Digital Research Alliance of Canada, including the DMP Assistant, a national, bilingual platform for the creation and management of data management plans (DMPs), the Federated Research Data Repository, a bilingual publishing platform for sharing and preserving Canadian research data, and Lunaris, Canada’s national discovery service for multidisciplinary data from over 100 academic, government, and research repositories across the country. This session will introduce participants to these platforms and provide an overview of how they support the research lifecycle. Attendees will gain valuable insights into the benefits of these tools and how they can help researchers to streamline their data management workflows.

This presentation will occur on June 13 from 1:30 P.M. to 2:50 P.M. Eastern Daylight Time.

2023 COSS Data and Software Management: Good Practices to Support Long-term Access to Data and Code

Join members of the Alliance’s Research Data Management and Research Software teams to learn more about good practices for data and software management. We’ll share guidance to help you keep your data and code accessible in the near and long-term, such as file naming, file formats, dataset or package structure, comments, versioning, and documentation. We’ll also touch on things to consider if you plan to share or publish your data or software in the future, such as licensing, software sustainability, and ethical issues in data sharing and reuse.

This presentation will occur on June 13 from 3:00 P.M. to 4:30 P.M. Eastern Daylight Time.

2023 COSS Encrypted Workflows on Multi-user Supercomputers

Using high-performance computing (HPC) or cloud environments inevitably means sharing storage and compute resources with strangers, and entrusting our code and data to the care of system administrators. While these systems usually operate in good faith and provide best-practice security, data breaches may still happen. Encryption can provide some additional protection for highly sensitive data, but it is not a magic bullet for data security. In this presentation, we showcase a two-part workflow and discuss the security benefits and unavoidable risks. In the first part (storage), we demonstrate how the Rclone program can be used to safely send data to a remote storage system such that it is encrypted at rest. In the second part (compute), we discuss how these encrypted data can be utilized for compute tasks in the HPC context, where scheduling is involved.

This presentation will occur on June 14 from 9:00 A.M. to 10:20 A.M. Eastern Daylight Time.

2023 COSS Using Containers: Apptainer

This presentation is for those interested in using containers on our clusters and will cover using Apptainer (formerly called Singularity). Additionally, there will be discussion concerning how to convert Docker containers into Apptainer containers as well as issues concerning building containers.

This presentation will occur on June 14 from 10:30 A.M. to 12:00 P.M. Eastern Daylight Time.

2023 COSS Multicore Parallel Programming (OpenMP)

In this session, lectures and hands-on labs are interspersed, and the students will learn the basics of shared memory programming with OpenMP. In particular, we will discuss the OpenMP's execution and memory model, performance, reductions and load balancing. Basic Linux and C/C++ knowledge will be assumed.

This workshop will be delivered online in one session:

  • June 14 from 1:30 P.M. to 4:30 P.M.

2023 COSS Advanced Research Computing with Julia

Julia is becoming increasingly popular for scientific computing. One may use it for prototyping as Matlab, R and Python for productivity, while gaining the same performance as compiled languages such as C/C++ and Fortran. The language is designed for both prototyping and performance, as well as simplicity. This is an introductory module on julia. Students will be able to get started quickly with the basics, in comparison with other similar languages such as Matlab, R, Python and Fortran and move on to learn how to write code that can run in parallel on multi-core and cluster systems through examples.

This workshop will be delivered online in four sessions over two days:

  • June 15 from 9:00 A.M. to 12:00 P.M. Eastern Daylight Time
  • June 15 from 1:30 P.M. to 4:30 P.M. Eastern Daylight Time
  • June 16 from 9:00 A.M. to 12:00 P.M. Eastern Daylight Time
  • June 16 from 1:30 P.M. to 4:30 P.M. Eastern Daylight Time