Training Programme of PRACE SoHPC 2019 at CINECA – Welcome to the Supercomputing World!

Pozdravljeni iz Slovenije!

Today I want to share my experience with you about the training week of SoHPC in CINECA (Supercomputing Centre for Scientific Research in Bologna, Italy). The week started with meeting new people from different countries. We attended the training sessions from morning 9:00 AM to 6:00 PM. Though we were somewhat exhausted still we didn’t stop. We roamed around the city, ate food, interacted with each other and found more about everyone’s different & interesting projects. With this training week, the bond among us has become stronger, in fact, we are already planning to meet again very soon.

We earned a significant knowledge about MPI, OpenMP, GPU Programming, 3D Visualisation, Blender and much more in a very short span of time. We had a tour of the CINECA Supercomputer infrastructure where we saw different (MARCONI, GALILEO, D.A.V.I.D.E.) supercomputers, how they are cooled by air & liquid, and the complex advanced network required to connect them.

Alessandro Marani gave a very useful session on how to get started with Supercomputers. I got chance to hands-on experience with HPC Galileo supercomputer, created and ran my first job script using SLURM commands to compute the program parallelly.

Nicola Spallanzani gave an excellent session on MPI (message passing interface). MPI is a high-performance computing application. It is a standardized means of exchanging messages between multiple computers running a parallel program across distributed memory for writing distributed computing applications. Each MPI process can only access its local memory.

Fabio Pitari gave a great session on another HPC API – OpenMP, which has a different approach compared to MPI. It is used for writing shared memory multi-process applications.

Dr. Andrew Emerson very well explained GPU programming with CUDA. Graphics Processing Units (GPU) are now used in HPC and machine learning applications for streaming computations. Most important vendors for HPC and machine learning are NVIDIA who also developed the CUDA language.

Then Dr. Leon Kos gave a session on an important topic – Scientific Visualisation with Paraview which is an open-source multiple-platform application for interactive, scientific visualization.

Francesca Delli Ponti gave a session on a very interesting tool to manipulate 3D objects – Blender. Blender is a free and open-source 3D computer graphics software toolset used for creating animated films, visual effects, art, 3D printed models, interactive 3D applications and video games.

The training week is finished, it’s really crazy how fast time flies! The best part of the training week was meeting many different people, getting new ideas and seeing happy faces.

Many thanks to Massimiliano Guarrasi & Dr. Leon Kos for organizing this wonderful & unforgettable training week.

All the 25 participants are now working at their respective HPC centers across Europe. I will be spending the next two months in LECAD Laboratory in Ljubljana, Slovenia. Firstly, I am super excited to work in this city. Most people speak English here, so living here will be comparatively easier for me. It is small but packed compactly with cultural highs, nature, sea, and mountains. I already have a bucket list of places I need to cover in this green boutique global destination.
I have started working on an Electrical Energy Consumption Industrial project. It has started off at a good pace and me & my mentor Dr. Janez Povh are planning to increase the project complexity. The work here is done in Slovene language and sometimes I have to translate it to English. Thanks to the handy google translator! I am really enjoying working abroad and learning a foreign language.

Stay tuned for future posts (which will be more focused on the project I am currently working on).

References: PRACE Summer of HPC Training Materials