On April 20th 2026 ISU in coordination with Dr. Aditya Balu will be hosting a FREE workshop on Distributed Parallel Deep Learning. This will be a two part workshop beginning from 8-11am where students will learn to install software in a micromamba environment. Afterwards from 12-5pm students will have the opportunity to see their code run. This is an introductory course on machine learning and using LLMs. This is a hands on workshop where attendees will have access to ISU's computer cluster Nova. In this workshop attendees will learn:
• How to run deep learning codes and models
• How to perform inference with large language models in Nova
• Distributed parallel deep learning
• How to train simple models using Jupyter Notebook
• How to use Ollama with LLMs
• Training using slurm jobs
Participants will need to bring their own personal laptop. If one is not available one can be borrowed from https://www.lib.iastate.edu/find-borrow-request/tech-lending/laptop-and-equipment-checkout
Registration for the event can be found here: https://forms.office.com/r/bvHrt6tn1T
Below are the instructions for the workshop setup phase that will take place from 8-11am. Note that you will need an active Nova account to complete this prior to the workshop. If you do not have an account you will need to wait until that morning to follow the steps as an account will not be provided for you until the registration is closed.
Event: Distributed Parallel Deep Learning Workshop
Date: April 20th, 2026
Time: 8-11am, 12-5pm
Location: 206 Durham Center 613 Morrill Rd, Ames, IA 50011
Setup instructions: 2026-04-20 - Deep Learning Setup Instructions.pdf
Workshop slides: Parallelism in Deep Learning - Combined.pdf