Overview
Teaching: 20 min
Exercises: 0 minQuestions
Who are we?
Who are you?
What will we do in this course?
Objectives
Introduce the instructors.
Get to know the students and how they want to use the cloud.
Provide an overview of the course.
Ensure everyone has their environments setup.
| Day of the week | Date | Time (ADT) |
|---|---|---|
| Friday | October 20st | 1:00 - 3:00pm |
| Friday | October 27th | 1:00 - 3:00pm |
Cloud computing offers a wide range of usage possibilities. From running basic HTML sites for publishing works, to collaborative wikis, to running persistent twitter/web scrapers automating data collection and processing, to providing platforms to help support whole research communities. Possible use cases are varied and wide ranging. One particular example using the Compute Canada cloud is Voyant Tools, a web-based text reading and analysis environment. It is a scholarly project that is designed to facilitate reading and interpretive practises for digital humanities students and scholars as well as for the general public.
Humanities and social sciences often make use of computers in varied and diverse ways typically not needed by the more traditional high performance computing tasks. Cloud computing provides the required flexibility for these varied and diverse usage cases. However, this flexibility comes at a cost. To facilitate a wide array possible use cases, much of the configuration and setup must be undertaken by individual researchers and not by the central bodies which manage the cloud infrastructure. With each cloud setup being customized and unique it becomes difficult to manage centrally in a consistent manner and much of the management and customization is left to the end cloud user.
This course is composed of three main parts.
Part I will introduce the basics of working with static website generators in particular will show how to use the Jekyll static website generator with a theme selected from one of the many Jekyll theme repositories. We will walk through the steps to configure your website and how to explore our downloaded theme in order to learn how to use it. We will use Markdown to format text and include links and images in our pages. We will even use a little HTML in our markdown to embed a youtube video in one of the pages of our site.
Part II will introduce basic concepts of cloud computing and get our hands dirty creating a virtual machine to host the Jekyll site created in Part I. We will apply software and security updates on our virtual machine and install a webserver to publish our Jekyll site to the world. There will also be a quick demonstration of an alternate hosting method involving github.
Part III will show how to setup a graphical user interface (e.g. GUI or desktop) and connect to a remote GUI desktop on our virtual machines and use it with GUI applications.
Before we begin make sure you have completed the steps in the setup page. If you have had difficulty with any part of them, now is the time to let us know and we will help you solve them.
Key Points
Cloud computing is very flexible and has many diverse uses.
Setup of Alliance cloud environments is left to its users, enabling great flexibility but requiring more knowledge.
In this course we will setup a cloud environment to run a Jekyll site.