Summer of HPC 2016 - Kick-Off @ JSC

Summer of HPC is a PRACE programme that offers summer placements at HPC centres across Europe to undergraduates and postgraduate students. This year, 21 students from more than 10 different European countries were selected from over 100 applicants. The students will spend two months working on projects related to PRACE scientific or industrial work and eventually prepare a visualization or video as well as a written report of their results.

However, before working together with domain scientists at the hosting sites, participants had to acquire a basic knowledge of HPC. This year's training week took place at JSC from 4 to 8 July and included lectures and hands-on sessions. During the week-long courses, the students learned basic HPC parallelization techniques such as MPI, OpenMP, and CUDA as well as visualization of scientific data. The training also included a high-performance kart race at the nearby Michael Schumacher race track to explain the subtle differences between latency and bandwidth in an experimental setup.

After this challenging and eventful kick-off, two students will remain at JSC for their summer project. Peter Labus from Italy, supervised by Stefan Krieg, will dive into the field of lattice quantum chromodynamics; Johannes Pekkilä from Finland, supervised by Andreas Beckmann, will support the development of fast multipole methods for molecular dynamics simulations on GPUs.
(Contact: Dr. Ivo Kabadshow, i.kabadshow@fz-juelich.de)

JSC News, No. 243, July 2016