Towards a European Training Network in Scientific Computing Pekka Manninen, PhD CSC – IT Center for Science Ltd

Prologue

Weapons modeling Intelligence Radar image processing Tactical simulation Aerodynamics Special FX Animation movies Search engines Oil deposit finding Stock rates prediction Banking & insurance databases Drug design Military Commercial Nuclear physics Mathematics Quantum chemistry Fusion research Climate change Weather forecasting Genetics Materials science Organ modeling Scientific 1960

Outline Supercomputing education & training: challenges Europan supercomputing: the PRACE project Training & education initiatives within PRACE – Face-to-face learning programme – Online Training Portal – PRACE Advanced Training Centres

Utilizing supercomputers is difficult A supercomputing application has to employ 1, ,000 processors at the same time: massive parallelism – Programming these machines is much more difficult than that of a laptop Scientists that employ the machines are (usually) not computer scientists: – Interdisciplinary user community – Lack of programming skills Training & education & user support: as important for a fully functional supercomputing ecosystem as the machines themselves

PRACE in a nutshell Provide world-class supercomputer systems for world- class science – Deploy systems of the highest performance level (Tier-0) with ensuring diversity of architectures Create a permanent research infrastructure through a single European legal entity Provide the full ecosystem for the PRACE systems – Application enabling, user support – Grid access – HPC training network

Challenges for PRACE training activities PRACE comprises of 23 countries – Large geographical distances – Large differences in users’ skills and training needs Great variety of skills that need to be transferred Interdisciplinary audience from all levels

PRACE training activities Seasonal Schools & Workshops in HPC all around Europe – 9 seasonal schools, 7 workshops so far – Almost 700 reserachers trained, great impact in European HPC know-how PRACE Training Portal PRACE Advanced Training Centers – Local resource centers for HPC training & education

Training surveys PRACE has conducted two landscape analysis on HPC training & education needs in Europe Pronounced demand for HPC skills transfer in all levels from basic to advanced – The results are utilized in planning of PRACE trainings Both of these reports are publicly available at

Slides & lecture recordings from all PRACE f2f training events: 100 hours of lecture videos

PRACE Advanced Training Centres Mandate “The PRACE Advanced Training Centres will serve as European hubs of advanced, world-class training for researchers working in the computational sciences.” Vision “When all centres are functional, the PATC network is a visible and important part of the electronic research infrastructure in Europe.” Six centers for – Finland (CSC), France (MdS/GENCI), Germany (GSC), Italy (CINECA), Spain (BSC), UK (EPCC)

Training collaboration ”EU-U.S. Summer Schools on HPC Challenges in Computational Science” organized jointly together with the U.S. XSEDE e-Infrastructure – 2010 in Italy, 2011 in California, 2012 in Ireland Exploring collaboration possibilities with other nations as well – China, Japan and Canada likely to join the organization of 2013 EU-U.S. summer schools

Summary Supercomputing: the no-nonsense path to progress PRACE is building a permanent, pan-European research infrastructure for high-end scientific computing – An elaborate training programme is paramount for the success of the infrastructure PRACE training activities – Face-to-face events: Workshops and Seasonal Schools – Training Portal – PRACE Advanced Training Centers For more information, see