PRACE Summer of HPC 2017 Training Week

Most Summer of HPC participants arrived in Ostrava on Sunday. For them, an adventure that will see them away from home, friends and family for a period of two months had just began. But this adventure would see them working on a HPC related project in various European HPC centers where during this time they would learn a lot, furthering their knowledge and skills on HPC, programming and life in general.

The learning began during the PRACE Summer of HPC training week which took place between Monday 3rd – Friday 7th July 2017 at IT4Innovations, Czech Republic.

PRACE Summer of HPC 2017 group photo

During this week, participants learned about PRACE and the Summer of HPC program. Given this is part of PRACE’s outreach activities they were taught about social media and its impact. They were also shown the Summer of HPC blog, were advised on how to best write blog posts and how to share their posts using social media channels.

The Summer of HPC participants were also presented with various aspects of HPC. This included hands on sessions on how to access a HPC system, parallel programming and visualization. Various programming subjects including an introduction to MPI, introduction to OpenMP, vectorization and parallel debugging were also shown to participants.

PRACE SoHPC Participants learning hard

During the week, participants and organisers of the Summer of HPC program took part in various social events. Each night all of them would have dinner together – giving everyone the opportunity to get to know each other better and create friendships.

PRACE Summer of HPC 2017 dinner – one of many

Other team building activities included a visit to the lower area of Vítkovice – a site of industrial heritage which includes ironworks with a unique collection of industrial architecture, and clubbing at Stodolní street. More details of these social events can be found in Dimitra’s “Ostrava : A city with a heart of steel” post.

PRACE Summer of HPC 2017 lower area of Vítkovice visit

After a final barbecue farewell dinner, participants set off for their project sites in various locations around Europe. There they would stay for the next seven weeks, learning more about various HPC related subjects, working hard on their projects and exploring the wonders of the cities and countries they would be based in.

The PRACE Summer of HPC 2017 gang