The Research Computing Services (RCS) staff members are available to assist you in your research by offering individual consulting, in-person tutorials, and self-paced online tutorials. We want to help you maximize your productivity on the Shared Computing Cluster (SCC) and other facilities you may use for your research computing activities. Many documents, tutorials, and presentations have been developed by Research Computing staff; many of these are specific to Boston University facilities.
Consulting
We offer consulting services free of charge on scientific programming, using our systems, and graphics & visualization projects. We provide individualized assistance for your particular project and offer expertise in parallelizing code, program optimization for our environment, scientific libraries, and visualization techniques.
Additionally, our consultants can help you to learn and use our many available software packages.
Current RCS Tutorial Series
Research Computing Services (RCS) offers a Tutorial Series three times each year covering Research Computing Basics, Computer Programming, High Performance Computing, Mathematics and Data Analysis, and Visualization. Announcements are sent out at the beginning of the Fall, Spring, and Summer I semesters with the specific offerings and schedule. Always available to the BU community are the a fairly recent video, slides, and third party tutorial links for each of the tutorials, including retired ones and ones not being offered during the current semester.
RCS Customized Instruction for Research Groups and Academic Courses
On request, Research Computing staff will offer an extra session of an RCS tutorial and/or customize tutorials for courses, seminars, or research groups. Please request an in-classroom tutorial if you would like an RCS staff member to present one of the RCS tutorials in your research lab or classroom. If your academic course uses the SCC, please, instead, see the Academic Support web pages and fill in the semesterly course request form. For other customized tutorial requests, please send email to help@scc.bu.edu.
Self-Paced Online Tutorials
Self paced tutorials developed by Research Computing staff, NCSA, vendors, and others are available.
Presentations Archive
Over the years, Research Computing staff have created presentations for workshops, seminars, and other special events. The Powerpoint slides, web pages and other materials may be a useful references.