The Swiss National Supercomputing Centre (ETH Zurich / CSCS) and Università della Svizzera italiana (USI) are pleased to announce that the annual Summer School will be held exceptionally as an online course this year, at the time originally announced - from July 13 to July 24, 2020.

Content

This summer school will focus on the effective exploitation of state-of-the-art hybrid High-Performance Computing (HPC) systems with a special focus on Data Analytics. The content of the course is tailored for intermediate graduate students (3rd year Bachelor's students, Master’s students, Ph.D students, and early stage Postdocs) interested in both learning parallel programming models, and having hands-on experience using HPC systems. Starting from an introductory explanation of the available systems at CSCS, the course will progress to more applied topics such as parallel programming on accelerators, code optimization, scientific libraries, and deep learning software frameworks.

The following topics will be covered:

•    GPU architectures
•    GPU programming (CUDA and OpenACC)
•    Performance optimization and scientific libraries
•    Interactive supercomputing (JupyterLab)
•    Python HPC libraries (Numpy/SciPy/Dask/Numba)
•    Introduction to Machine Learning and GPU optimized frameworks (Rapids)
•    Deep Learning on HPC platforms (TensorFlow)

Lectures will be held by ETH Zurich / CSCS, USI, and our partner organization from the industry NVIDIA.

COURSE STRUCTURE

Extensive lab sessions will help to clarify and consolidate the theoretical material. The virtual training will be composed of lectures and interactive sessions for hands-on, as well as Q&A. We are aiming at limiting the lectures to 50% so as to have enough time for hands-on; however, the mileage may vary depending on the topic.

EXAM

Students will be able to earn six ECTS credit points for this course from Università della Svizzera italiana (subject to exam): https://search.usi.ch/en/courses/35260874/effective-high-performance-computing-data-analytics-summer-school

The examination method will be a quiz on the last day of the summer school program. The quiz will be done on iCorsi and covers all objectives and content of the course. It will include closed-ended questions (which will then be assessed automatically by the system) and open-ended questions (which will be assessed by the lecturers and professors). Students will be notified about the result of the examination by Tuesday, July 28, 2020.

TARGET AUDIENCE

The target audience is intermediate graduate students, which includes 3rd year Bachelor's students, Master’s students, Ph.D students, and early stage Postdocs.

REQUIREMENTS

Applicants have to meet the following requirements:

• Good knowledge of C/C++ and basic knowledge of Python
• Basic understanding of MPI
• Familiarity with the UNIX/Linux OS and the basic programming environment tools (terminals, editors, compilers)
• Require HPC skills for their work or research

Only applicants who satisfy all requirements will be considered. Participants will work on their own laptop for practical sessions. Credentials for accessing the machines will be provided to selected students, who will have to sign a form for temporary use of the supercomputer resources.

APPLICATION PROCESS (deadline extended)

If you meet all requirements, kindly download the application form, fill it in and send it to summerschool2020@cscs.ch no later than Sunday, May 31, 2020.

You will be notified about acceptance or rejection of your application by Tuesday, June 9, 2020. Due to the large number of applications, additional time will be required for the evaluation process. You will be notified about acceptance or rejection of your application by Tuesday, June 16, 2020.

Those candidates whose application successfully passes the selection process will receive further information regarding registration.

PARTICIPATION FEE

Registration for this program is free-of-charge. Mentors and learning materials are offered by CSCS, USI, and NVIDIA.

Candidates whose application successfully passes the selection process will receive further information regarding registration.

INQUIRIES

Inquiries may be addressed to summerschool2020@cscs.ch.

The summer school is supported by:

• The Swiss Graduate School FOMICS - "Foundations in Mathematics and Informatics for Computer Simulations in Science and Engineering”, which is located at the Institute of Computational Science (www.ics.usi.ch) at USI in Lugano, Switzerland.
• The Swiss National Supercomputing Centre (www.cscs.ch) in Lugano, Switzerland