EPCC HPC Summer School 2024
12 July 2024
The EPCC HPC Summer School 2024 has now finished and our 16 students have returned home after their two-week stay in Edinburgh. We hope they have gained interesting and useful knowledge about high performance computing.
Lewis HPC Summer School participant 2024"Thanks for the great experience at the EPCC HPC Summer School, I really enjoyed it!"
Selection
The call for applications from UK undergraduates opened in April. We selected over 30 people for interview out of 115 applications, and offered places to 16 students. We were pleased to welcome students from a wide variety of backgrounds, ranging from those in their first to their final year of study in subjects including Astrophysics, Computer Science, Bioinformatics, Computational Physics and Aeronautical Engineering. Participants came from universities all over the UK including Belfast, Bristol, Durham, Edinburgh, London, Reading and York.
Logistics
Our School ran for two weeks, from Saturday 22nd June to Saturday 6th July. As well as paying for their travel and accommodation, we also gave students a £35 daily stipend to cover living costs. The University accommodation was self-catered and less than ten minutes walk from EPCC's base in the Bayes Centre building.
Most mornings there were lectures and practical sessions in the nearby Lister Learning and Teaching Centre, with students spending their afternoons in EPCC's base at the Bayes Centre, working on programming exercises based on the morning's material. They were given access to our Cirrus national Tier-2 supercomputer, which supports all of the parallel programming models taught in the School.
What did the students learn?
After covering an introduction to the Unix shell (based on material from HPC Carpentry) and a refresher to programming in C, we went on to cover the basics of HPC architecures, and parallel programming using OpenMP GPU offloading. EPCC's Teaching Fellow, Ludovic Capelli, did much of the training using material he had previously developed for a variety of hands-on HPC workshops.
Students had the opportunity to apply all these techniques to a number of real applications including image processing and computational fluid dynamics simulations.
We also had a trip to the Advanced Computing Facility to show them real hardware such as Cirrus and ARCHER2, as well as the ongoing preparations to host future Exascale systems.
The School concluded with a morning of guest lectures on "Research at EPCC" (Julien Sindt, EPCC), "Quantum Computing" (Oliver Brown, EPCC) and "Past, Present and Future of Supercomputing" (Tim Dykes, HPE). Finally, we organised a farewell meal for the group at a local restaurant.
Jessie HPC Summer School participant 2024"An enormous thank you to you and your team for hosting us these two weeks, it has been a really valuable time and the material has been taught really well. I hope I come across EPCC and get to work with you all in the future again."
Was it a success?
I definitely enjoyed teaching and helping the students out during the School, and several told me they enjoyed being based right in the centre of Edinburgh. I know many took the opportunity to discover the city, including visiting the attractions such as Edinburgh Castle and the Botanic Gardens, or climbing Arthur's seat, the extinct volcano that gives a wonderful view of Edinburgh and the surrounding countryside.
I was very impressed with how much the students learned in such a short time. Also how keen they were to investigate parallel programming and to try to get the best performance from the CPUs and GPUs on Cirrus.
Subject to funding availability, we're keen to run the EPCC HPC Summer School again in 2025.
Links
EPCC is a leading provider of high performance computing and data science education and training in Europe. Learn more about what we can offer you:
https://www.epcc.ed.ac.uk/education-and-training
