Courses and Workshops CSCS

Summer School 2015 on Effective HPC announced

The Swiss National Supercomputing Centre and Università della Svizzera italiana are pleased to announce the opening of the selection process for participation in the annual Summer School.

The Summer School will be held from July 20 through July 30, 2015, in Hotel Serpiano, located in the Italian area of Switzerland. The hotel is positioned on Mount San Giorgio, UNESCO World Heritage site since 2003, wherefrom participants can enjoy an incredible view of Ceresio lake and its surroundings.

Requirements

The Summer School is dedicated to Master and Ph.D. students, academic staff and professionals.

Applicants have to match the following requirements:

  • Good knowledge of at least one of the following programming languages:
    • Fortran 90
    • C
    • C++
  • Familiarity with the UNIX/Linux OS and the basic programming environment tools (terminals, editors, compilers)
  • Require HPC skills for their work or research.

Only applicants who satisfy all requirements will be considered. Participants will need to bring their own laptop for practical sessions.

Content

The school will focus on the effective exploitation of High Performance Computing (HPC) systems.

Current and coming generations of HPC systems are increasing in size and complexity. Multi-core processors, general purpose graphic accelerators (GPUs), many-cores accelerators (MIC), ultra-fast parallel storage devices, and high bandwidth low-latency networks are being combined to be used effectively for scientific and technical computing. On suitable classes of algorithms, outstanding performance can be achieved with power efficiency significantly higher than traditional architectures, considerably minimising overall times-to-solution of high-end scientific problems. An efficient usage of such hybrid architectures is not a trivial task, often requiring a full redesign and refactoring of the code in order to expose those features that can be optimally exploited by a given hardware component, as massively parallel algorithmic components, that can be effectively accelerated by the GPU, or overlapping computation and communication in order to scale on thousands of CPUs.

Traditional parallel programming approaches, based on the message-passing paradigm, are no longer sufficient to fulfil this task, and innovative solutions need to be addressed.

During the two weeks of the school a number of such solutions will be presented. The MPI, OpenMP, CUDA, OpenACC programming models will be introduced, together with scientific libraries and efficient I/O and data visualisation solutions and optimisation techniques. Their effective combined usage, in order to achieve an ideal exploitation of large hybrid architectures, will be discussed and experimented with extensive practical and exercise lab sessions to help clarify and consolidate the theoretical material presented.

The following topics will be covered:

  • Message passing programming model and the MPI standard
  • Shared memory systems and the OpenMP programming model
  • Scientific libraries
  • MPI I/O and other solutions for efficient data reading and writing
  • GPU programming with CUDA and OpenACC
  • Code optimization
  • Scientific visualisation

Application Process

If you meet all requirements, kindly fill in the application form and send it to summerschool2015@cscs.ch no later than Sunday, April 12, 2015.

Thirty applicants will be selected to participate in the Summer School. You will be notified about acceptance or rejection of your application by Monday, April 27, 2015.

Those candidates whose application successfully passes the selection process will receive further information regarding the registration.

Participation Fee

Rate for academic staff, PhDs and university students: CHF 1’300

Rate for non-academic professionals: CHF 2’600.00

Fees include:

  • Eight full-day and one half-day intensive courses based on theoretical and practical coaching in a group of 30 participants
  • Learning materials introduced by instructors
  • A visit to the Swiss National Supercomputing Centre (CSCS)
  • Double room accommodation together with another participant throughout the duration of the course (eleven nights from Sunday, July 19 through Thursday, July 30, 2015)
  • Breakfast, lunch and dinner during weekdays
  • Breakfast during the weekend

Participants can book additional nights at their expense before or after the event at the same favorable rate of CHF 118.00 for a room with double occupancy, or CHF 99.00 for a room with single occupancy.

Additional information will be published here »