Jülich CECAM Node Activities 2022
The Jülich CECAM node supports and runs workshops, tutorials, and internships within the international CECAM network, which consists of the CECAM headquarters in Switzerland and 17 nodes located in 10 countries in Europe and Israel. The network’s calendar of activities had to be adjusted due to the pandemic, which made it difficult or impossible to organize on-site events. Although a large number of activities had to be postponed or cancelled during the first year of the pandemic, many workshops or tutorials could be held last year, either remotely or as hybrid events. This form of organization has brought some flexibility and offers hope that the planned activities for 2022 can go ahead as scheduled.
The next event will be the workshop “Recent Advances in Machine Learning Accelerated Molecular Dynamics”, which will take place in Pisa on 16–18 March as a co-organized multi-node event. It continues a series of workshops on biomolecular simulations and aims to foster an exchange of ideas in the emerging field of machine learning techniques.
The workshop “Virtual Materials Design”, planned for 18–21 July, will take place at KIT and reflects the activities and members of the Helmholtz Joint Laboratory Virtual Materials Design. A similar workshop was organized in July 2021 as a full online event, using the conference program gather.town. The large number of more than 200 participants encouraged the organizers to repeat the event in 2022.
On 12–16 September, the bi-annual tutorial “Atomistic Monte Carlo Simulations of Biomolecular Systems” will be organized at JSC. It will give a broad introduction to Monte Carlo methods ranging from basic to advanced, including Markov Chain Monte Carlo methods and generalized ensemble techniques. Participants will also gain hands-on practice of these methods on JSC’s HPC systems.
Another multi-node event entitled “Ions, Membranes and Channels: Multiscale Simulations from Quantum to Coarse-Grain”, organized by the French, Italian and UK nodes as well as Jülich, will take place on 27–29 October in Rome. This workshop, held in honour of Mike Klein, had to be postponed in 2020 due to the pandemic.
Finally, the regular annual event “International Guest Student Programme on Scientific Computing” is being organized for the timeframe 1 August – 7 October, for which a separate report will follow in due course.
While we are still optimistic that we will be able to organize the various events as on-site meetings, our experience from the last two years has shown that even remote or hybrid events can be efficiently organized, and therefore CECAM will continue to keep international networking active. Further information can be found at https://fz-juelich.de/ias/jsc/cecam.
Contact: Prof. Godehard Sutmann
from JSC News No. 286, 7 February 2022