Hands-on Learning for Researchers Across Various Disciplines

Are you looking to learn new data or computational skills? We provide regular workshops, access to online learning resources, and guides to help you learn new skills and use our services effectively. Enhance your abilities, expand your expertise, and discover how to optimize your research at one of our Research Computing and Data Services (RCDS) sessions. Select from various 60- and 90-minute workshops available online and in-person.

Research Computing Basics and Beyond

Whether you’re new to Quest or ready to tackle more complex workflows, join us for these day-long sessions to accelerate your learning. Our data and computing specialists will guide you through choosing appropriate storage and computing resources and techniques for using these resources effectively. Registration is per day, so sign up for the sessions that fit your experience and research needs.

Quest Orientation

This session is strongly recommended for new users, especially those without previous HPC experience. It builds on the information covered in our Introduction to Quest video series to help you navigate data storage options, transfer data to and from Quest, submit jobs, and identify the best way to use Quest in support of your research. Participants should have an active Quest account and bring their laptops; all Northwestern researchers can request a Quest account (allocation) if they don’t have one already.

Genomics Compute Cluster

This workshop series is designed to cover topics of interest to the research community that uses the Genomics Compute Cluster (GCC) at Northwestern. Most workshops can be attended ad hoc, but some of the content builds on itself from week-to-week, and some require attendance at the first workshop of the series, ‘Command line introduction’, so please read the description of each. These workshops will be held in-person on the Chicago campus. To participate fully, you will need to bring a laptop with you to each workshop.

Learning Resources

Learning Resources

• Resource Guides: Research Computing and Data Services team members have curated lists of free books, videos, online courses, tutorials and other materials to help you learn R, Python, SQL, git, and more.
• O’Reilly Online Learning: Northwestern University Libraries provides online access to many popular books and other resources covering programming, software development, data visualization, machine learning, and other technology topics. Register for an account. with a Northwestern email address by clicking “Institution not listed?”; once you have an account, you can log in directly.
• LinkedIn Learning: Northwestern Human Resources provides access to courses on a wide range of technology topics, including databases, programming, and data analysis.
• Quest User Guide and Documentation: your guide to using Northwestern’s high-performance computing cluster.

Talk to a Consultant

Are you looking for help from a person instead? We can meet with you one-on-one to answer questions on using computational and data resources and methods in your research.

• Data Science, Statistics, and Visualization
• Quest High-Performance Computing
• Genomics Compute Cluster
• Cloud Computing
• National Computing Resources such as ACCESS
• Data Management and Workflows