PDC Summer School 2025

Each year in August, the PDC Center for High Performance Computing (PDC) and the KTH School of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (EECS) hold 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). Participants learn the skills needed to utilise high-performance computing (HPC) resources for research. The school consists of lectures and guided hands-on lab exercises using the Dardel HPC system, which is hosted at PDC.

There are lectures on research software engineering, modern HPC architectures, and both parallel and GPU programming, along with hands- on practice using OpenMP-CPU, OpenMP-GPU, and MPI, plus programming AMD GPUs with HIP and SYCL, given by national and international speakers. This year the speakers were Ana Lucia Varbenescu (University of Twente), Erwin Laure (Max Planck Computing and Data Facility), Tim Dykes and Harvey Richardson (HPE HPC/AI EMEA Research Lab), Samantha Wittke (CSC – IT Center for Science), and Andrey Alekseenko and Niclas Jansson (PDC).

The school started with an online introduction for two half-days, ensuring that the attendees had the basic knowledge required to work in an HPC environment. PDC staff Parasuram Indraganti, Arash Banaei, Karl Johan Westrin, Ilari Korhonen, and Johan Hellsvik, lead by Henric Zazzi, helped the attendees to become familiar with the HPC environment at PDC and to be able to log in and use Dardel. On Monday the following week, the PDC Director, Patrick Norman, opened the on-site part of the school at the KTH main campus. As well as lectures and hands-on sessions, the five days at KTH included short talks on important HPC topics, round-table discussions, flash talks by the participants and a tour of the PDC computer hall and Dardel guided by Luca Manzari from PDC.

Two years ago, short talks on sustainability aspects in supercomputing – plus case studies in scientific disciplines like quantum chemistry, fluid dynamics and molecular dynamics – were added to the programme of the school. The participants perceived these initiatives very positively. Thus, this year the program included a sustaINABILITY lecture by Luca Manzari and lectures on the scientific software VeloxChem, GROMACS and Neko from an HPC perspective given by Xin Li, Szilárd Páll and Niclas Jansson (all from PDC).

To promote interactions and networking between participants and trainers, this year we introduced round-table discussions on parallel and GPU programming, plus career paths in HPC. Attendees were invited to give a short presentation on themselves, their project and their interest in HPC. This year, there were around 30 attendees from different parts of Europe, at various stages of their careers with a high representation of Ph.D. students from Swedish academia.

The summer school has been held since 1996 and has always been a collective effort. A big thanks to all the PDC staff over the years who have made the summer school possible and successful!