About training week

The Summer of High Performance Computing (SoHPC) is a program run by the Partnership For Advanced Computing in Europe (PRACE), and it gives you a chance to learn and enjoy your summer at one of the supercomputing Centers in Europe.

The Summer of HPC started with a training week in Barcelona. All the selected 20 participants were there for a week to meet, and learn about High Performance Computing (HPC) at Barcelona supercomputing Center (BSC).

We had a bit of a crowded timetable at BSC, but it was useful, and we enjoyed it very much. Of course we were tired, who would not be tired after 8 hours of concentrating? The program covered not just the parallel architectures, but the parallel programming, designing and performance analysis were also included.

On the first day (on Monday, 29 June 2015) we had the chance to introduce ourselves, and this day was also dedicated to the introduction of the Summer of HPC (SoHPC). Actually this day was the lightest load day. On the second day we visited the amazing supercomputer, it’s name is MareNostrum. It is placed in the middle of a glass cube in a chapel. It looks amazing. You have to know the cube takes up a space of 120m², it has 1.1PetaFlops peak performance and 100.8 TB of main memory, which means it takes the place of 77th in the list of Top 500 supercomputers. On this day we participated in a course on the usage of OpenMPI and a very efficient and a flexible performance analysis tool developed by BSC. On Wednesday and Tuesday we continued with the extension of knowledge about parallel libraries. The superiors at BSC offered us some insight into OpenMP/OmpSs, CUDA and hybrid programming also. I have to mention that OmpSs Programming Modell is also developed by BSC. On the last day (Friday, 3 July 2015) we learned about 3D Scientific Visualisation in ParaView, OpenFoam and OpenGL. Of course all day there were some practical exercises.

During the week there was some leisure time also, we have visited the beach, some parks, and talked a lot with each other.

After the training week I awaited very much the new experiences, since I had to move to Ostrava, Czech Republic to take part in MediVis project at IT4Innovations National Supercomputing Center. I was well equipped with hope, excite and some experiences about HPC technologies so I can look into my future trustfully with the help from my old friend the scientist Galileo Galilei.

Participated students (BSC, 2015):