PDC Summer School 2025
The PDC Center for High Performance Computing (PDC) welcomes you to the "Introduction to High Performance Computing" summer school. This school is part of the Swedish e-Science Education (SeSE) programme and is supported by the Swedish e-Science Research Centre (SeRC).
The school focuses on the skills needed to utilise high-performance computing (HPC) resources for research. It consists of lectures and guided hands-on lab exercises using the Dardel HPC system at PDC. The school includes an introduction to parallel algorithms, parallel programming, modern HPC architectures, performance analysis and engineering, and software engineering. Case studies in various scientific disciplines will be used to help illustrate practical research applications of the topics.
Dates
- 14-15 August 2025, online, 9:00-12:00
- 18-22 August 2025, onsite at KTH, 8:00-18:00
Schedule
In general, for the part of the course held at KTH in Stockholm, there will be lectures alternating with hands-on sessions from 8:00-12:00 and 13:15-17:30 most days, followed by guided tour of Dardel and the PDC computer hall.
The full schedule is available under the timetable link in the menu .
Location
The lectures and hands-on exercises will be held in auditorium E2, Osquars backe 2, KTH Royal Institute of Technology main campus, Stockholm, Sweden.
Number of places available
The number of places available in the summer school is limited to 40.
Who can attend
Ph.D. students and researchers in scientific and/or high-performance computing (with academic or industrial/commercial backgrounds) from anywhere in the world are welcome to apply to attend the school.
What you will learn
This school provides the knowledge and skills needed to utilise high-performance computing (HPC) resources for research purposes. The school is especially suited to computational and data scientists, and a variety of relevant HPC use cases will be studied to help illustrate the topics. The school consists of both lectures and guided hands-on lab sessions.
By the end of this school, participants will have done and/or will be able to do the following.
- Describe the architecture of modern supercomputers and the different computing units, including multi-core processors, and graphics processing units (GPUs)
- List the sustainability aspects of HPC and its impact on the environment and society
- Use programming models for shared-memory (OpenMP) and distributed-memory (MPI) programming to develop scientific applications for supercomputers
- List fundamental principles of GPU programming
- Understand programming principles of AMD GPUs with HIP and with SYCL
- Apply software engineering principles to develop scientific applications for supercomputers
- Practice programming on the PDC HPC supercomputers
- Apply the concepts that have been learned to real-world problems
Requirements
Applicants must be able to communicate in English, and have previous programming experience in C/C++ or Fortran. Applicants need to be familiar enough with at least one of these languages to be able to write and execute programs. Basic knowledge of mathematical analysis and linear algebra, and also UNIX/Linux is required.
Applicants who need to refresh their UNIX/Linux skills are recommended to review this introduction to the UNIX shell , which provide an overview of what participants are expected to know before attending the summer school, or this introduction to basic to Linux for new HPC users (link for this will be available here soon).
Participants will need to bring a laptop for participating in the lab exercises.
How to apply
To apply to attend the school, fill in the application form after the opening date.
Application form opens: 7 March 2025
Deadline for applications: 30 April 2025 (Note there are still a few places open, so applications to school are still open and will be closed when those places are filled.)
Notifications of acceptance: 15 May 2025
Deadline for payment of fees: 30 May 2025
Fees
The fees for the course cover attendance at all the online sessions, lectures, hands-on sessions and talks, as well as a Dardel tour and refreshments during the tea/coffee breaks.
SeSE Ph.D. student: 1,000 SEK
Note that SeSE doctoral students are Ph.D. students belonging to one of the SeRC or eSSENCE partner universities in Sweden (namely LU, LiU, KTH, KI, SU, UU and UmU).
Ph.D. students from other public research institutions (in Sweden or outside Sweden): 5,000 SEK
Postdoctoral researchers and staff from other public research institutions (in Sweden or outside Sweden): 5,000 SEK
Industry/business researcher: 15,000 SEK
Contact
If you need further information or help in relation to the PDC summer school, please contact hpc-summerschool@pdc.kth.se .
Speakers
These are the speakers who will give lectures during the summer school.
- Ana Lucia Varbanescu (Associate Professor, University of Twente and University of Amsterdam, Netherlands)
- Andrey Alekseenko (Researcher, PDC, KTH Royal Institute of Technology, Sweden)
- Erwin Laure (Director of Max Planck Computing and Data Facility, Munich, Germany)
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Harvey Richardson (Principal Research Engineer, HPE HPC/AI EMEA Research Lab)
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Luca Manzari (Computer Hall Manager, PDC, KTH Royal Institute of Technology, Sweden)
- Niclas Jansson (Researcher, PDC, KTH Royal Institute of Technology, Sweden)
- Patrick Norman (PDC Director, KTH Royal Institute of Technology, Sweden)
- Samantha Wittke (Research Software Engineer, CSC – IT Center for Science, Finland)
- Szilárd Páll (Research Engineer, PDC, KTH Royal Institute of Technology, Sweden)
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Tim Dykes (Senior Research Engineer, HPE HPC/AI EMEA Research Lab)
- Xin Li (Researcher, PDC, KTH Royal Institute of Technology, Sweden)
Teachers for online sessions & mentors
- Alessandra Villa
- Arash Alizad Banaei
- Henric Zazzi
- Ilari Korhonen
- Johan Hellsvik
- Jonathan Vincent
- Karl Johan Westrin
- Tuan Anh Dao
Dardel Tour Guide
- Luca Manzari
Organisers
- Alessandra Villa
- Niclas Jansson