News

Students with a Master of Science degree in an area such as Computer Science, Engineering Physics, or Mathematics are invited to apply for a four-year PhD position in High-Performance Computing at the High Performance Computing and Visualization (HPCViz) Department at the KTH School of Computer Science and Communication (CSC). The position is related to the new EU-project on exascale computing, EPiGRAM.

If you have specialized in parallel computing, or have a documented interest in Message Passing and Partitioned Global Address Space programming models, that will be regarded as an advantage.

Excellent written and spoken English is required to publish results and present them at conferences and in journals.  Please note that it is not necessary that you speak Swedish in order to be accepted as a PhD student at KTH.  We welcome applications from students from all over the world.

For further information about the position in English, please see:

http://www.kth.se/en/om/work-at-kth/vacancies/ph-d-student-in-high-performance-computing-1.393462

and for information in Swedish, please see:

https://www.kth.se/aktuellt/lediga-anstallningar/Assignmentview.aspx?guid=B4894FC8-30E0-41C0-9E90-9959B58F9193&templateid=0

Attendance at Professor Ujaldon's seminar on Programming GPUs with CUDA (which will be held at KTH on 20-21 June) is limited to 20 people.  For further information about the seminar, please see "Upcoming Events" on the PDC website, or contact Michael Schliephake.

The seminar "Introduction to using MPI and CUDA together" that was going to be held at PDC on 4 June has been postponed until after the summer break.  It will probably be held in September.  Further information will be made available as soon as the new date is confirmed.

The PRACE Autumn School on Industry Oriented HPC Simulations will be held at the University of Ljubljana in Slovenia from 23-27 September 2013.

The school will feature hands-on training courses with ANSYS, optiSLang, AVBP, elsA, and RBF Morph software.  There will be 12 lecturers coming from CADFEM, SimTeC, CERFACS, ONERA, CINECA, and the Universities of Rome "Tor Vergata", Ljubljana, Aveiro and New Brunswick, who work in the fields of Structural Mechanics, Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD and BIO-CFD) and Electromagnetics (HFSS and Maxwell).

The school is offered free of charge to industrial users, researchers and academics residing in PRACE member states and eligible countries.

Registration will remain open as long as there are still seats available!

For more information about the school, including registration and the school brochure, please see:  http://events.prace-ri.eu/event/as13

The Partnership for Advanced Computing in Europe (PRACE) Summer School, "Enabling Applications on Parallel Architectures based on Intel® Many Integrated Core (MIC)", will be held at Cineca, Bologna, Italy from 8-12 July 2013.

Please note that the summer school is free of charge (for students and academics residing in PRACE member states) and there are some grants available for eligible students, however the number of places on the course is limited to 24. We therefore recommend registering as soon as possible!  Final registration closes on 14 June.

For further information about the PRACE Summer School and registration, see:

http://events.prace-ri.eu/conferenceDisplay.py?confId=181

Researchers whose projects fit the criteria of the PRACE Preparatory Access calls are invited to submit applications for Preparatory Access in time for the next cut-off date of 3 June.

PRACE's Preparatory Access is intended for testing and developing code in order to prepare applications for PRACE Tier-0 project access. In particular, note that Preparatory Access Type C includes code development with support from PRACE experts. This special call will feature a big amout of additional person months just dedicated to code development support on MIC systems. For further information, see the PRACE web page:

http://www.prace-ri.eu/Call-Announcements

The Preparatory Access Call is a rolling call, so researchers can apply for access at any time - proposals are then reviewed every third month. The next cut-off date is 3 June 2013, at 11:00 AM CEST.

The systems available for Preparatory Access are:

• CURIE, BULL Bullx cluster (GENCI@CEA, France)
• FERMI, IBM Blue Gene/Q (CINECA, Italy)
• HERMIT, Cray XE6 (GCS@HLRS, Germany)
• JUQUEEN, IBM Blue Gene/Q (GCS@JSC, Germany)
• MareNostrum, IBM System X iDataplex (BSC, Spain)
• SuperMUC, IBM System X iDataplex ( GCS@LRZ, Germany)

There is also a prototype system available (2013 pilot case):

• EURORA, Eurotech SandyBridge+Intel MIC hybrid cluster (CINECA, Italy)

The criteria for the PRACE Calls, as well as further details about the PRACE machines, application process and peer review process, can be found at:

http://www.prace-ri.eu/

If you need extra information please feel free to contact PRACE directly via

peer-review@prace-ri.eu

or contact the PRACE SNIC Coordinator, Dr Michaela Barth.

The KTH School of Computer Science and Communication (CSC) is looking for an Assistant Professor in High Performance Computing. The position will be based at the Department of High Performance Computing and Visualization (HPCViz), which is part of the KTH Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm. Suitably qualified applicants who speak English or Swedish are invited to apply by 19 April 2013.

For information about the position and application procedure in English, please see:

http://www.kth.se/en/om/work-at-kth/vacancies/assistant-professor-in-high-performance-computing-1.376714

and for information in Swedish, please see:

http://www.kth.se/om/work-at-kth/lediga-anstallningar/Assignmentview.aspx?guid=3F521396-F5B6-4909-94F1-10E33B693BCF&templateid=0

If you have any questions about the job, you are welcome to contact Erwin Laure:

erwinl@pdc.kth.se

Invitation

Are you interested in using one of Europe’s faster supercomputers (and getting university credit points for doing so)?  Would you like to learn how to write programs for parallel supercomputers, such as a Cray or a cluster of Graphics Processing Units? Do you need to optimize already-existing scientific program code for high-performance computing? If you answered “yes” to any of these questions, or if you want to learn the basics about high-performance parallel computing, the PDC Center for High-Performance Computing, in conjunction with the School of Computer Science and Communication (CSC) at the KTH Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm, Sweden, invites you to our summer school: "Introduction to High-Performance Computing". The course will be held in Stockholm at the KTH main campus on August 19-30. The course is given in English and is open to researchers and Masters and PhD students, from anywhere in the world.

To find out more about our exciting summer school, and to register, visit our web page at

http://www.pdc.kth.se/education/summer-school

or

http://agenda.albanova.se/conferenceDisplay.py?confId=3830

Background

The PDC Summer School in High-Performance Computing has been held at the KTH Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm each summer since 1996 to help researchers to improve their scientific computing skills. This year will be the eighteenth year that the course has run.

During two intensive summer weeks at the KTH campus, summer school participants are introduced to programming supercomputers, and also learn how to improve programs for parallel scientific applications so that they run more efficiently.

Participants who successfully complete the course (including the associated programming project) will be awarded 7.5 ECTS (European Credit Transfer and Accumulation System). Note that 1.5 ECTS credits are equivalent to a workload of one 40-hour week, so the whole course is equivalent to five full-time weeks of study including project work. Participants are encouraged to bring their own problems or programs for discussion – where possible, these may be used as the basis of the course project. During the summer school, participants will be given access to PDC's Cray XE6 system, Lindgren, which is one of the fastest supercomputers in the Nordic countries.

There are a limited number of spaces available on the course, so please register early!

Registration for the 2013 summer school opened on March 15 and will close on June 1.

Outline

The summer school classes will consist of about 35 hours of lectures and 35 hours of computer lab sessions covering topics such as:

• parallel programming (MPI, OpenMP, GPU),
• modern computer architectures,
• parallel algorithms,
• efficient programming, and
• HPC case studies.

The lectures will be given by international experts followed by hands-on sessions in the PDC computer lab – these will give participants the opportunity to obtain practical experience of the HPC topics covered in the lectures.

The first Nordic e-Infrastructure conference will take place in Trondheim, Norway on 15 & 16 May 2013, with preceding workshops on 13 & 14 May. This will mark the 10-year anniversary of Nordic collaboration in computing and storage services for science. The aim of this conference is for the Nordic user communities to cooperate with the people who comprise the skill base that exists within the national e-Infrastructure organizations of the Nordic countries so as to develop ideas, and to elicit opportunities for cost-efficient common solutions and joint e-Infrastructure services.

The First Nordic e-Infrastructure Conference will be hosted by the Nordic e-Infrastructure Collaboration, UNINETT Sigma and NTNU - Norwegian University of Science and Technology, in collaboration with NORDUnet, DeiC (Danish e-Infrastructure Collaboration), CSC – IT Center for Science (Finland), SNIC (Swedish National Infrastructure for Computing), and the University of Iceland.

The registration fee is €200 (NOK 1500) which covers attendance at the workshops and conference, as well as the welcome reception and the conference dinner.

For more information about the conference (including how to register), please go to

www.neic2013.no

Would you like to work with the largest high-performance computer in Sweden?

PDC is the leading Swedish supercomputing centre hosted by KTH. It operates state-of-the-art computational and storage resources. Amongst these systems is the CRAY XE6 supercomputer Lindgren - with 36,000 cores, it is one of Europe's most powerful systems with a theoretical peak performance of over 300 TF.

PDC is looking for a student to help out during the summer 2013 (starting at the beginning of June) with several of the following tasks:

• answering support questions from PDC's users,
• writing and testing documentation for PDC's resources,
• studying software performance on PDC resources,
• helping PDC system staff with everyday work, and
• monitoring PDC resources.

Undergraduate and postgraduate Science or Engineering students with a documented interest in hardware or software aspects of computing are invited to apply. You need to be able to use Linux-based systems, and communicate in English with ease. (Note that you do not need to be able to speak Swedish.) Experience in parallel computing (for instance, previous attendance at the PDC High Performance Computing Summer School) will be an advantage. It is also important that you can work independently (after being given instructions) and that it is easy for others to work with you. If you are the kind of person who takes the initiative when things need to be done, that will be a definite plus!

Please send your application, including a cover letter and CV, to career@pdc.kth.se before the 15th of April. For more information about the position, please contact Gert Svensson, +46-8-790 7884, gert@pdc.kth.se or Erwin Laure, +46-8-790 6514, erwinl@pdc.kth.se.

We are happy to announce that the next PRACE Spring School will run from 9am on Tuesday 23 April to 4pm on Friday 26 April. The school is organized by SNIC and is being hosted by the High Performance Computing Center North (HPC2N) in Umeå, Sweden. Expert presenters from the PRACE Advanced Training Centers (PATCs) and vendors will combine lectures and hands-on sessions to provide an introduction to accelerator programming.

Please take advantage of this unique opportunity to participate in a PATC training event with such a future-relevant topic when it is being held so close to us. "Everybody" has to relearn parallel programming in relation to data locality and other accelerator specifics if we want to go Exascale!

The school is offered free of charge to students and academics residing in PRACE member states. Lunches, coffee breaks and an evening dinner event are all included. The official language of the school will be English. Please note that the number of full participants is limited to around 30. The deadline for registration is 31 March, but we recommend applying early.

For more details about the program and the qualifications necessary for enrolling, see https://www.hpc2n.umu.se/prace2013/information where you will also be able to register.

P.S. Even though this is called the "Spring" school, please be aware that it might still be cold in Umeå in April!

The PRACE 7th Project Access Call for Proposals is now open!

Researchers from academia and industry are invited to apply for access to any of the resources in the PRACE Tier-0 Research Infrastructure for the purposes of open research and development.  The time allocations will be for one year starting from early September, 2013.

For full details about applications and eligibility criteria, please see:

www.prace-ri.eu/Call-Announcements

In particular, please be sure to submit applications by noon on March 26th (12:00 CET Brussels time) as late submissions will not be considered.

If you need extra information or help with your application, please either contact PRACE directly via peer-review@prace-ri.eu or contact Dr. Michaela Barth, the PRACE SNIC coordinator.

The 2013 International Summer School on HPC Challenges in Computational Sciences will be held at New York University, New York City, USA from 23-28 June 2013.

The U.S. National Science Foundation's Extreme Science and Engineering Discovery Environment (XSEDE) project, the European Union Seventh Framework Program's Partnership for Advanced Computing in Europe (PRACE), and RIKEN Advanced Institute for Computational Science (AICS) have collaborated to offer this expense-paid program for graduate students and postdoctoral scholars who use high-performance computing to conduct research.

Interested students should apply by March 18. Meals, housing, and travel expenses will be paid for the selected participants.

For more information, please see:

https://www.xsede.org/web/summerschool13

Applications for summer jobs with the PRACE "Summer of HPC" programme will open on 25th January 2013.  If you are a student and would like to spend the summer working abroad at a European High Performance Computing Centre, please apply as early as possible via the Summer of HPC website:

http://summerofhpc.prace-ri.eu

Further details about the programme are available on the website now.

The 2013 Exascale Applications and Software Conference (EASC 2013 - Solving Software Challenges for Exascale) will be held on 9-11 April 2013 in Edinburgh, Scotland.

Early bird registration is open until 28 February, with a final registration deadline of 1 April.

For further details about EASC 2013, please see: http://www.easc2013.org.uk

The launch and first Plenary of the Research Data Alliance (RDA) will be held on 18-20 March 2013 in Gothenburg, Sweden.

The Research Data Alliance (RDA) is being formed as a global community-driven organization to accelerate data-driven innovation through research data sharing and exchange.  Broad community engagement and targeted efforts are critical to the RDA's success and you are invited to participate actively in the RDA's launch and first Plenary with three days of outstanding speakers, working sessions, active contributions, and community discussion.

Details about the RDA First Plenary (including registration and accommodation) can be found under "First Plenary" at the RDA website:

http://rd-alliance.org

The 10th issue of the PRACE Newsletter (coming out four times per year) has been published and it features many topics of interest for PDC users or where PDC is involved:

• PRACE is continuing with the protoype evaluation work to test promising new technologies
• CRESTA as featured Project: The concepts, facts and figures
• PRACE is welcoming Belgium as 25th member state
• The upcoming PRACE Summer of HPC 2013 where application will open January 25th

These and many more articles you'll find in the last issue of the PRACE Newsletter!