PDC Summer School 2023

This course focuses on the skills needed to utilize 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 course 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

14-25 August 2023 (in person in Stockholm) plus one week of individual work to be completed afterwards

Location

KTH Royal Institute of Technology main campus, Stockholm, Sweden

The rooms for the lectures and hands-on exercises will be advised later.

Number of places available

The number of places available in the summer school is limited to 50.

Who can attend

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 course.

What you will learn

This course provides the knowledge and skills needed to utilize high-performance computing (HPC) resources for research purposes. Information about the topics that are covered in the course can be found in these detailed descriptions. The course 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 course consists of both lectures and guided hands-on lab sessions.

By the end of this course, 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, NVIDIA graphics processing units (GPUs), and AMD 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 the fundamental principles of programming NVIDIA and AMD GPUs and develop efficient GPU-accelerated applications
• Apply software engineering principles to develop scientific applications for supercomputers
• Use performance monitoring tools to identify performance bottlenecks and optimize application performance on supercomputers
• Apply high-performance data analysis and visualization techniques to scientific applications
• Practice programming on the PDC HPC supercomputers and apply the concepts that have been learned to real-world problems

Credit points for the course

Participants who successfully complete this course (including the associated programming project) will be awarded 5 ECTS (European Credit Transfer and Accumulation System) points. The course is part of the KTH doctoral course catalogue.

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 these UNIX tutorials, 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.

Participants will need to bring a laptop for participating in the lab exercises.

How to apply

All applicants need to fill in the application form.

SeSE Ph.D. students should also send a letter of support letter from their doctoral supervisor to PDC Support (support@pdc.kth.se) by the application deadline, noting that the letter is associated with their application to attend the PDC Summer School.

Note that SeSE doctoral students are Ph.D. students attending one of the SeRC or eSSENCE partner universities in Sweden (namely LU, LiU, KTH, KI, SU, UU and UmU).

Deadline for applications: 30 May 2023

Notifications of acceptance: PDC plans to send notifications of acceptance by the 15^th of June 2023.

Deadline for payment of fees: 30 June 2023

Fees

SeSE Ph.D. student: free (no fee)
Note that SeSE students are 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 and researchers 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 PDC Support (support@pdc.kth.se).

Schedule

In general, there will be lectures from 9:00-10:00 and 13:00-14:00 most days, followed by hands-on guided lab sessions from 10:00-12:00 and 14:00-16:00. A detailed timetable will be published soon.

Trainers

The following are some of the speakers who will give lectures during the summer school.

• Ana Lucia Varbanescu (Associate Professor, University of Twente and University of Amsterdam, Netherlands)
• Erwin Laure (Director of Max Planck Computing and Data Facility, Munich, Germany)
• Ivy Peng (Department of Computer Science, KTH, Sweden)
• Jean M. Favre (Senior Visualisation Software Engineer, Swiss National Supercomputing Centre, Switzerland)
• Niclas Jansson (Researcher, PDC, KTH, Sweden)
• Pekka Manninen (Director of Science and Technology, CSC - IT Center for Science, Finland)
• Szilárd Páll (Research Engineer, PDC, KTH, Sweden)
• Xin Li (Researcher, PDC, KTH, Sweden)