PDC Summer School 2024

Every August the PDC Center for High Performance Computing (PDC) and the School of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (EECS) at the KTH Royal Institute of Technology run the PDC Summer School “Introduction to High Performance Computing”. The school is part of the Swedish e-Science Education (SeSE) programme and is supported by the Swedish e-Science Research Centre (SeRC). The school is open to academic and industry researchers and focuses on the skills that researchers need to effectively utilise high-performance computing (HPC) resources for research and/or development. It consists of lectures and guided hands-on lab exercises using the Dardel HPC system hosted at PDC.

This year’s school ran for a week from 19-23 August on site at the KTH campus in Stockholm. The school started with a lecture by Ana Lucia Varbenescu, University of Amsterdam and University of Twente, Netherlands, on modern HPC architectures, followed by a lecture on research software engineering for HPC by Radovan Bast from the University of Tromsø, Norway. The first day closed with a lecture on sustainability aspects in supercomputing by Stefano Markidis, PDC. On Tuesday, Niclas Jansson, also from PDC, told the attendees about OpenMP-CPU and OpenMP-GPU. Tim Dykes and Harvey Richardson, from

the HPE HPC/AI EMEA Research Lab, gave an overview on GPU programming and Joan Vinyals Ylla Català, Barcelona Supercomputing Center, Spain, spoke about performance analysis. At the end of the day, Luca Manzari from PDC led a tour of Dardel and the PDC supercomputer hall. Wednesday was fully dedicated to advanced GPU programming, debugging, and profiling with Tim and Harvey. During the last two days, the attendees learnt about MPI from Erwin Laure, Director of the Max Planck Computing and Data Facility, Germany. Case studies in various scientific disciplines helped to illustrate practical research applications of the topics: in particular, the scientific software GROMACS by Szilárd Páll (PDC), VeloxChem by Xin Li (PDC) and Neko by Niclas Jansson (PDC). Finally, PDC’s director, Patrick Norman, presented PDC and the Swedish HPC Landscape. The complete schedule of the school and links to materials can be found here: www.pdc.kth.se/summer-school/2024/timetable-1.1319716 .

The school brought together around 40 attendees at different stages of their careers and coming from different part of Europe and the USA with a high representation of Ph.D. students from Swedish academia. Overall, the attendees ranked the school between very good and excellent. Some found it a bit too fast or too short. Indeed the PDC summer schools usually run for two weeks, but this year, due to dates overlapping with other events, the school was concentrated into one week. A big thanks to all the PDC staff who helped with mentoring during the summer school and who supported the school attendees on the Dardel supercomputer.

Above: PDC Summer School “Introduction to High Performance Computing”, 19-23 August 2024