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CSC Summer School in High-Performance Computing 2013

CSC Summer School in High-Performance Computing 2013
Date: 25.06.2013 13:00 - 04.07.2013 13:00
Location details: -
Language: english-language
lecturers: Jussi Enkovaara (Aalto University)
Sami Ilvonen (CSC)
Martti Louhivuori (CSC)
Antti Karkman (University of Helsinki)
Ali Oghabian (University of Helsinki)
Pekka Manninen (Cray Inc)
Price: -
CSC Summer School brings together undergraduate and graduate students and postdoctoral researchers in different disciplines of scientific computing. The contents consist of lectures and hands-on training on parallel programming, code optimization and other necessary skills in development of scientific software.

General information

The school takes place at Nuuksio, Espoo, Finland. It is conveniently located in the Helsinki metropolitan area.  The venue is near a preservation area that resembles Finland's nature at its best.

School starts on Monday June 24, 2013 and departure is on Wednesday July 3. The two weeks between those are filled with coding, sports & leisure activities and good time together. Be warned that at this time of the year, sun will not set almost at all!

The school is aimed for graduate students working in various fields of science, e.g., chemistry, physics, life sciences, engineering or economics. Also undergraduates as well as post-docs will find the school very useful.

Some skills to operate in a Unix environment will be assumed. No previous programming skills are necessary; however, knowledge in some programming language will ease up grasping the concepts. The first lectures in Fortran or C will begin more or less from beginning. Therefore it is basically possible to build up HPC expertise from zero up to an intermediate/semi-advanced level during the school.

The participants will get a certificate from the school that contains a recommendation to your home university to grant you 6 credits (ECTS) for the school.

Program

The following topics will be covered:

  • Basics of parallel programming with the message-passing interface (MPI) and OpenMP paradigms
  • More advanced topics in MPI and hybrid MPI+OpenMP parallel programming
  • Fortran 95/2003 and C programming languages in scientific programming
  • Improving application scalability and serial performance
  • Parallel programming tools, compilers and libraries
  • Building real-world HPC application suites.

A keynote lecture "Why are things the way they are?" will be given by Prof. Kari Enqvist.

The detailed programme is available as a pdf file.

Each module will consist of lectures and related hands-on exercises. The school will also feature group work assignments prepared during the school and digested at the end of the school. The separate exercises/projects sessions are meant for continuing the exercises started during the modules or working with the group work projects with an instructor present.

Accommodation

Accommodation takes place in 1 and 2 person rooms with en-suite shower and toilet. Linen and towels will be provided. The single rooms will be given to those who have registered earliest to the school (i.e. allocated by the order of registration).

Previous summer schools

This is the fourth CSC Summer School in HPC, have a look at the previous schools: 2010, 2011, 2012. By looking at last year school's materials, you will get an idea about the contents of the Summer School 2013.

Quotes from participant feedback from the 2012 school:

"Majority of the teachers actually had surprisingly good pedagogic skills! Their attitude was great too, lecturers
and tutors always did their best to help us understand and cope with the exercises, explaining things on the
level that would most help the specific student. An important practicality was that there were enough breaks
(and coffee...) between the lectures. For me the goal was not to be totally proficient in HPC after taking this course, but I took it as more of an introduction to the subject. I definitely learned what I wanted to, and feel now much more confident in solving some problems myself, but more importantly collaborate with actual professionals (group project was great with this respect!)."

"I felt that the amount of lectures and excises were well in balance. We had good series of exercises to clarify
what was taught in the lectures, and enough time to actually work on them. Also, the teachers assistance
during the exercise sessions were really helpful."

"I really think I learned a lot. And had lots of fun. First I was a bit skeptic of the exercise part of the program, but I was positively surprised on how fun they were, especially the canoeing trip and the games."

"Yes, it really was very intensive in many ways. But we had so much fun too (which was probably pretty obvious
to anyone around... :), and were possibly because of that generally able to keep the work pace and spirit up till
the end. Of course the group was great, but the well-planned program and setting for sure played their part."

The attendees of the CSC Summer School 2012 gave a rating of 9.04/10.00 for the school (the average of 22 responses as an answer to the question "Overall, how would you rate the event? 1=Waste of time, 10=Excellent").

Course materials