Welcoming our new cohort of MSc students

This year around eighty students have joined our MSc programmes. Welcome Week requires a careful balance of ensuring we prepare them for the year ahead without bombarding them with so much information that they feel overwhelmed. We have focused on introducing the students to the programme, giving the information they need to choose from the range of courses we offer, and sorting out technicalities like setting them up with accounts on the various high performance computing (HPC) platforms they can use during their time with us. 

The students also had the chance to look around EPCC's offices in the Bayes Centre including their dedicated study area, which is right alongside the offices where EPCC staff work. To help the cohort get to know each other, we also let them try out some of the fun outreach activities that EPCC takes to science festivals around the UK. This proved to be a really good way of getting them to start thinking about working together, and was a good precursor to the ever-popular pizza and drinks reception at the end of the week. 

In previous years EPCC's Welcome Week has included a session that ensured all students understood the basics of the C programming language before they started writing parallel programmes. This year, with a new course on Programming Languages for HPC introduced into the programme, we have incorporated the basics of compiled programming languages into the curriculum. This is required as the prevalence of languages like Python means it's possible to be a competent programmer without having ever compiled a programme. Students will also learn about more complex language features in various languages that are particularly suited to parallel programming and HPC. 

So now it's down to work!

MSc programmes at EPCC

EPCC offers a suite of two linked masters programmes. Our programmes in High Performance Computing, and High Performance Computing with Data Science are available both on-campus (full-time and part-time) and online (part-time intermittent). Alongside this, we also offer a joint Master’s programme with Heriot Watt University on Imaging, Vision, and High Performance Computing.

Learn more: https://www.epcc.ed.ac.uk/education-and-training/masters-programmes