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CSC Summer School in High-Performance Computing 2014

CSC Summer School in High-Performance Computing 2014
Date: 01.07.2014 13:00 - 10.07.2014 16:00
Location details: -
Language: english-language
lecturers: Mikko Byckling (CSC)
Jussi Enkovaara (CSC)
Sami Ilvonen (CSC)
Antti Karkman (University of Helsinki)
Martti Louhivuori (CSC)
Pekka Manninen (Cray Inc)
Jarmo Mäkelä (FMI)
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.

Lake in NuuksioGeneral 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 30, 2014 and ends on Wednesday July 9. The ten days between those are filled with coding, sports & leisure activities and having good time together. Be warned, though, that at this time of the year, the sun will not set almost at all in the Nordic night!

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 possible to build up HPC expertise from almost 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:

  • Fortran 95/2003 and C programming languages in scientific programming
  • Basics of parallel programming using the message-passing (MPI) and threading (OpenMP) paradigms
  • Introduction to Fortran coarrays and Unified Parallel C partitioned global address-space (PGAS) approaches
  • Introduction to accelerator/GPU programming with OpenACC
  • More advanced topics in MPI
  • Hybrid parallel programming combining MPI, OpenMP, OpenACC, and PGAS models
  • Improving application scalability and serial performance
  • Parallel programming tools, compilers and libraries
  • Building real-world HPC application suites.

The detailed programme is available as a pdf file.

Each module will consist of lectures and related hands-on exercises. The separate exercises sessions are meant for continuing the exercises started during the modules 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 schoolsCanoe trip on Lake Nuuksio

This is the 5th CSC Summer School in HPC, so have a look also at the previous schools: 2010, 2011, 2012, 2013. From the materials of last year's school you will get an idea about the contents of the Summer School 2014.

Quotes from participant feedback of the past schools:

"I learned lots of things that are useful to me and I immediately started implementing them in my work on my first day back to the office!"

"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."

"I enjoyed a lot and learned a lot in a nice atmosphere and I will recommend this event to my colleagues. I was impressed by excellent organization. Importantly, my primary goal was to get a general impression of the subject but I discovered that programming may be fun, like learning a foreign language without exceptions:-)"

The attendees of the past three CSC Summer Schools have given an average rating of 9.05/10.00 for the school (the average of 50 responses as an answer to the question "Overall, how would you rate the event? 1=Waste of time, 10=Excellent").

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Course materials