New shortened versions in English and Finnish (based on the ChatGPT'ed version)
Bringing CSC Services Closer to Students Through Training Collaboration
At CSC, we’re committed to supporting Finnish higher education institutions and research institutes by offering powerful computing and data management services, free of charge for academic use. One of the best ways to raise awareness of these resources is by collaborating on training activities that introduce students to our services early in their academic journey and they can then smoothly continue using our services on research.
Each year, we organize around 70 training sessions, both onsite and online. To better meet user needs, we’ve also launched self-learning courses, which have been well-received. Recently, we’ve taken our first steps into deeper training collaboration with universities and universities of applied sciences.
Training collaboration initiatives
One great example is our partnership with OAMK’s Manne Hannula. He has crafted a course package using a combination of our online materials and his own assignments. The course has already run three times, attracting about 40 students each time. Hannula shares: “When we learned about the supercomputers, our smiles grew bigger, as we got access to CSC’s Puhti and Mahti supercomputers and their thousands of cores and terabytes! All this within only a few ssh and sbatch commands!”
Another example comes from the University of Helsinki’s Master's Programme in Theoretical and Computational Methods, where CSC courses are being integrated directly into the course portfolio, making it even easier for students to find relevant training.
Integration with university teaching schemes is also being pursued in collaboration with Aalto University. Recently the CSC-driven Practical Deep Learning course was delivered at the Aalto campus, attracting a total of 57 on-site and online participants.
Plans for corresponding courses are currently being drawn up with Arcada University of Applied Sciences. Further to directly benefiting students seeking to gain experience of deep learning workflows and CSC supercomputers, the initiatives with Aalto and Arcada contribute toward the wider LUMI AI Factory teaching and training goals.
We’re also inspired by the “satellite learning” concept, used successfully in CodeRefinery courses. We hope to apply the same model to our "CSC Computing Environment" course. The idea is simple: local teachers host an in-person classroom while connecting with our CSC specialists via Zoom for support during online sessions.
Tailored training is another way we collaborate. For example, Joona Tolonen delivered a Linux course at the University of Helsinki this spring, and Juha Lento joined Aalto University’s "Intro to Scientific Computing" course with a guest lecture on CSC resources. These collaborations are always welcome but require separate agreements depending on our available staff.
Open course materials and support services
All our course materials and self-learning resources are freely available. We also offer support services such as Noppe notebooks for hosting course environments, and Pouta and Rahti cloud services for running virtual machines and containers for course environments.
We’re excited to continue building these collaborations across Finland. If you're interested in working with us, please contact Atte Sillanpää — we’d love to hear from you!
Authors: Maria Lehtivaara, who else?
Read more
CSC training portfolio https://research.csc.fi/training-portfolio/
Training calendar https://research.csc.fi/training/
CodeRefinery https://coderefinery.org/
Tuomme CSC:n palvelut lähemmäs opiskelijoita koulutusyhteistyön avulla
CSC tukee suomalaisia korkeakouluja ja tutkimuslaitoksia tarjoamalla tehokkaita laskenta- ja datanhallintapalveluja maksuttomasti akateemiseen käyttöön. Yksi parhaista tavoista lisätä tietoisuutta näistä resursseista on tehdä yhteistyötä korkeakoulujen kanssa ja järjestää koulutuksia, joissa opiskelijat tutustuvat palveluihimme jo opintojensa alkuvaiheessa. Näin siirtyminen palvelujen tutkimuskäyttöön käy sujuvasti.
Järjestämme vuosittain noin 70 koulutusta, sekä paikan päällä että verkossa. Käyttäjien tarpeisiin vastaamiseksi olemme lanseeranneet myös itseopiskelukursseja, jotka ovat saaneet hyvän vastaanoton. Viime aikoina olemme ottaneet ensimmäisiä askeleita syvempään koulutusyhteistyöhön yliopistojen ja ammattikorkeakoulujen kanssa.
Esimerkkejä yhteistyöstä
Yksi hieno esimerkki on yhteistyö Oulun ammattikorkeakoulun Manne Hannulan kanssa. Hän on rakentanut kurssipaketin, jossa yhdistyvät CSC:n verkkomateriaalit ja hänen omat tehtävänsä. Kurssi on järjestetty jo kolmesti, ja kullakin kerralla osallistujia oli noin 40. Hannula kuvailee palveluiden käyttöönottoa: "Kun tutustuimme supertietokoneisiin, siitä se hymy voimistui! Saimme pääsyn CSC:n Puhtiin ja Mahtiin sekä pääsimme kiinni niiden tuhansiin ytimiin ja teratavuihin! Ja kaikki tämä vain muutaman ssh-komennon ja sbatchin päässä!”
Toinen esimerkki tulee Helsingin yliopiston teoreettisten ja laskennallisten menetelmien maisteriohjelmasta, jossa CSC:n kursseja on integroitu suoraan kurssitarjontaan. Näin opiskelijoiden on entistä helpompi löytää sopivaa koulutusta.
Myös Aalto-yliopiston kanssa on edistetty opetuksen integrointia. Hiljattain CSC:n vetämä Practical Deep Learning -kurssi järjestettiin Aallon kampuksella, ja siihen osallistui yhteensä 57 henkilöä paikan päällä ja verkossa.
Arcada-ammattikorkeakoulun kanssa suunnitellaan parhaillaan vastaavia kursseja. Näiden lisäksi Aallon ja Arcadan aloitteet tukevat laajempia LUMI-tekoälytehtaan opetustavoitteita, jotka liittyvät tekoälyn ja syväoppimisen koulutukseen.
Olemme vaikuttuneita myös satelliittioppimisen mallista, jota on käytetty menestyksekkäästi CodeRefinery-kursseilla. Haluamme soveltaa samaa yksinkertaista ideaa CSC:n Computing Environment -kurssilla: paikalliset opettajat vetävät lähitunteja ja CSC:n asiantuntijat tukevat Zoomin kautta verkko-osuuksien aikana.
Räätälöidyt koulutukset ovat yhteistyön yksi muoto. Esimerkiksi Joona Tolonen piti Linux-kurssin Helsingin yliopistossa keväällä, ja Juha Lento vieraili Aallon Intro to Scientific Computing -kurssilla luennoimassa CSC:n resursseista. Tällaiset yhteistyöt ovat aina tervetulleita, mutta vaativat erilliset sopimukset henkilöstöresurssien mukaan.
Avoimet materiaalit ja tukipalvelut
Kaikki kurssimateriaalimme ja itseopiskeluresurssit ovat vapaasti saatavilla. Lisäksi tarjoamme tukipalveluja, kuten Noppe notebook-ympäristöt kurssien käyttöön sekä Pouta- ja Rahti-pilvipalvelut virtuaalikoneiden ja konttien ajamiseen.
Odotamme innolla yhteistyön laajentamista ympäri Suomen. Jos haluat tehdä kanssamme yhteistyötä, ota yhteyttä Atte Sillanpäähän – kuulemme mielellämme sinusta!
Kirjoittajat: Maria Lehtivaara , kuka muu?
Lue lisää:
CSC:n koulutusportfolio https://research.csc.fi/training-portfolio/ (englanniksi)
Koulutuskalenteri https://research.csc.fi/training/ (englanniksi)
CodeRefinery https://coderefinery.org/
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Old versions
We at CSC -IT Center for Scientific Computing hope to raise awareness of our computing and data management services that are free of charge for Finnish higher education institutes and research institutes. One way to do this is through training collaboration. This way students find out about our services and learn about data management and high performance computing early on, and can then smoothly continue using our services on research.
CSCs services for training at your use
CSC's cloud and high-performance computing services are available free of charge to all higher education students, supporting them with any course — not just those offered by CSC itself. Students can access these resources via the my.csc.fi self-service portal, where they can create a MyCSC Student project and activate the necessary services.
Our course material and self-learning courses are in free use for everyone. For example, our "CSC Computing Environment" materials (https://csc-training.github.io/csc-env-eff/) also invite participants to suggest edits and additions!
We also offer Noppe (https://research.csc.fi/service/noppe/) notebooks service as a platform for hosting course environments. Lecturers can for example build their own RStudio environments with the needed packages installed, or use existing ones (more info and list of existing available images here: https://docs.csc.fi/cloud/noppe/guide_for_teachers/). Students can easily log on with their Haka accounts, after which everything runs smoothly online, without worries of whether everyone has the same versions of tools and data. For example CSC's collaboration with the Helsinki university has been highly fruitful in setting up a complex R environment for the scRNA course on Noppe, enabling a unified and seamless computing environment for running the course.
Also Pouta/Rahti is used to host virtual machines and containers for course environments. You can read more about the educational use of our services in this use case: https://research.csc.fi/use-case/environment-for-web-based-big-data-courses/ CSC naturally also supports the use of these!
CSCs training portfolio
We organise around 70 trainings per year, both onsite and online. Lately we have developed also more self-learning courses, as those were wished for by our customers. Lately, we have also developed a training portfolio (https://research.csc.fi/training-portfolio/) that hopefully helps to get an overview of our trainings, together with the training calendar (https://research.csc.fi/training/). As we are not an educational institute, we can't give credits or grades, but usually participants will receive a course certificate, which explains the course contents and suggests a suitable number of credits. Students can then take this certificate back to their home organisations.
Training collaboration initiatives
In 2025, we have been piloting different ways of training collaboration with higher education institutions. Our courses have been used as part of larger course collections, our courses have been added to universities training portfolios, and some of our courses have taken place at universities campuses -literally bringing them closer to the students and researchers!
Our collaborating teacher from OAMK, Manne Hannula, has collected a course package from three of our online courses. In spring 2025 this collaboration course was organised for the second time. On both rounds there were roughly 40 participants on the course. Manne introduces the topics and courses to the students, and gives the students couple of extra assignments. He then collects the course certificates as well as the students final reports. "--When we learned about the supercomputers, our smiles grew bigger, as we got access to CSC's Puhti and Mahti supercomputers and their thousands of cores and terabytes! All this within only few ssh and sbatch commands!" Manne replied when we asked how the course was going.
With Master’s Programme in Theoretical and Computational Methods in Helsinki University we have a different approach. They are adding our courses to their course portfolio, so that the master students can more easily find them and select those courses most relevant to them.
This year we also piloted a Portable GPU Programming course in collaboration with the University of Helsinki to bring advanced computing skills closer to students and researchers. The training was open to participants from all universities and held on Kumpula campus, with a University of Helsinki course code for students to earn credits easily. This pilot achieved record attendance and received excellent feedback.
Tailored courses and guest lectures can also be arranged
We do also offer tailored courses on various topics. This kind of collaboration is also possible, but is more depending on our available human resources, and thus needs to be separately agreed upon.
For example, Joona Tolonen did a Basics in Linux course with students from Helsinki University. Intensive course was tailored for the needs of the participants together with the university so that it matched their curriculum.
Integration with university teaching schemes is also being pursued in collaboration with Aalto University. Recently the CSC-driven Practical Deep Learning course was delivered at the Aalto campus, attracting a total of 57 on-site and online participants. Plans for corresponding courses are currently being drawn up with Arcada University of Applied Science. Further to directly benefiting students seeking to gain experience of deep learning workflows and CSC supercomputers, the initiatives with Aalto and Arcada contribute toward the wider LUMI AI Factory teaching and training goals.
At Aalto University, CSC has been contributing to the teaching of Aalto's "Programming Parallel supercomputers" course this fall. This year, students used the LUMI supercomputer as their training platform, and to support the onboarding process, Leopekka Saraste from CSC delivered three supplementary lectures on LUMI usage and general supercomputing practices.
Juha Lento 
joined the Aalto "Intro to Scientific Computing" course in June 2025 by giving a guest lecture on CSCs resources.
We also participated in the Geospatial challenge camp 2023 + 2025 as technical partner and mentor for challengecamp participants supporting their use of CSC data and compute resources for their projects. Next iteration coming in 2026: https://challenge-camp.geoportti.fi/en/latest/ .
Future development ideas
We have good experiences of "satellite learning" from CodeRefinery courses (https://coderefinery.org), and would love to add that as an option to some of our courses as well. Our "CSC Computing Environment" course is offered online in two parts twice a year. Each part takes 2 half-days. Courses take place in October and November, and in the spring in March and April. The idea would be that local collaborators could offer a physical classroom, where they could then work with the exercises together, and when needed, ask questions from our specialists via Zoom. This would be one option to strengthen the collaboration -please let us know if you would be interested!
We are happy to continue and widen our collaboration efforts! Should you be interested in getting onboard, contact Eeva Nyrövaara
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→ And the more or less same text ChatGPT'ed:
Bringing CSC Services Closer to Students Through Training Collaboration
At CSC – IT Center for Science, we’re committed to supporting Finnish higher education and research by offering powerful computing and data management services, completely free of charge for academic use. One of the best ways to raise awareness of these resources is by collaborating on training activities that introduce students to our services early in their academic journey.
Each year, we organise around 70 training sessions, both onsite and online. To better meet user needs, we’ve also launched self-learning courses, which have been well-received. Recently, we’ve taken our first steps into deeper training collaboration with universities and universities of applied sciences.
One great example is our partnership with OAMK’s Manne Hannula. He has crafted a course using a combination of our online materials and his own assignments. The course has already run twice, attracting about 40 students each time. Manne shares: “When we learned about the supercomputers, our smiles grew bigger, as we got access to CSC’s Puhti and Mahti supercomputers and their thousands of cores and terabytes! All this within only a few ssh and sbatch commands!”
Another example comes from the University of Helsinki’s Master's Programme in Theoretical and Computational Methods, where CSC courses are being integrated directly into the course portfolio, making it even easier for students to find relevant training. Integration with university teaching schemes is also being pursued in collaboration with Aalto University. Recently the CSC-driven Practical Deep Learning course was delivered at the Aalto campus, attracting a total of 57 on-site and online participants. Plans for corresponding courses are currently being drawn up with Arcada University of Applied Science. Further to directly benefiting students seeking to gain experience of deep learning workflows and CSC supercomputers, the initiatives with Aalto and Arcada contribute toward the wider LUMI AI Factory teaching and training goals.
We’re also inspired by the “satellite learning” concept, used successfully in CodeRefinery courses. We hope to apply the same model to our "CSC Computing Environment" course. The idea is simple: local teachers host an in-person classroom while connecting with our CSC specialists via Zoom for support during online sessions.
Tailored training is another way we collaborate. For example, Joona Tolonen delivered a Linux course at the University of Helsinki this spring, and Juha Lento joined Aalto University’s "Intro to Scientific Computing" course with a guest lecture on CSC resources. These collaborations are always welcome but require separate agreement depending on our available staff.
All our course materials and self-learning resources are freely available. We also offer support services such as Noppe notebooks for hosting course environments, and Pouta/Rahti for running VMs and containers.
We’re excited to continue building these collaborations across Finland. If you're interested in working with us, please contact Eeva Nyrövaara — we’d love to hear from you!
Link to this? https://www.enccb.be/interviewdirkvalkenborg
“—kun tutustuimme supertietokoneisiin, siitä se hymy voimistui kun saimme pääsyn CSC:n Puhtiin ja Mahtiin sekä pääsimme kiinni niiden tuhansiin ytimiin ja teratavuihin! Ja kaikki tämä vain muutaman ssh-komennon ja sbatchin päässä!”