EuroHack25: High Performance Computing Applications Programming Hackathon

Background

High Performance Computing utilizes more and more parallelism provided by modern supercomputers. One development is General-Purpose Graphics Processing Units (GPGPUs), which offers exceptionally high memory bandwidth and performance for a wide range of applications together with many parallel programming units. Another development is more parallelism also for multicore processors. Today, these devices can be programmed with the CUDA/C++ programming platform, HIP or with OpenACC Directives for Accelerators, which offer straightforward extensions to C++ and Fortran to address this programming hurdle. Alternative programming paradigms such as OpenCL or Kokkos can also be employed.

Targeted Applications

This year not only classical High Performance Computing applications are targeted but special emphasis will be towards scientific applications that make use of artificial intelligence / deep learning methods (AI).

Various parallelization approaches are targeted for AI: data, tensor, and pipeline parallelism for any of the frameworks (pytorch, pytorch lighting, NeMo, etc.) The applications can do pre-training, post-training, finetuning, and / or inference.

Workshop Goal

EuroHack provides a unique opportunity for current or prospective users groups of large hybrid CPU-GPU systems to either (1) port their (potentially) scalable application to GPU accelerators, (2) optimize an existing GPU-enabled application, on a state-of-the-art GPU system, or (3) optimize for the multicore. Focus should be in any case the parallelism of the application. In case of AI applications a special emphasis will be the extension from single-GPU to multi-GPU / multi-node setups. The goal is that the development teams leave at the end of the week with applications executing faster, or at least with a clear roadmap of how to get there.

Target Audience and Format

This program is addressed to small teams of 3 to maximum 4 developers interested in porting or optimizing their application on a cluster of CPUs and GPU accelerators in a short but extremely intense time window. This is a great opportunity for grad students and Postdocs.

Collectively the team should know the application intimately. There will be intensive mentoring during this 5-day hands-on workshop. Mentors come from universities and supercomputing centers such as CSCS and Swiss AI, as well as from industry such as NVIDIA, and they bring their extensive experience in programming GPGPUs, many of them contributing to develop the GPU-capable compilers and define the OpenACC standard. The in-person portion of the event will be limited to 5 or 6 teams of 3 to 4 developers with 2 mentors for each team.

Application Process

Team coordinators are invited to submit an application to be ported or optimized on GPUS or other massive parallel architectures by May 31, 2025 (AOE).

In preparation for your EuroHack25 submission, we offer a two half days virtual bootcamp for AI on April 23-24, 2025. Information on the bootcamp are available here (note the application deadline on April 4, 2025).

Applicants will be notified about acceptance or rejection of their application by June 30, 2025.

Groups whose application successfully passes the selection process will need to register for the event to confirm participation within two weeks from notification of acceptance. The notification of acceptance will include information on how to register.

Participation costs

Participation in the workshop is free of charge. For in-person participants, the meeting room, lunches and one conference dinner, as well as access to the supercomputers for all participants throughout the event are offered by the Swiss National Supercomputing Centre (CSCS). If participants prefer they can use their own GPU resource. Mentors and learning materials are provided by CSCS, Swiss AI, and OpenACC organization and other partner organizations.

In-person participants are responsible for their travels to the meeting venue, their accommodation, four dinners during the week, and personal expenses.

Venue (in-person participants only)

Groups selected for in-person participation will be hosted at the Swiss National Supercomputing Centre (CSCS) in Lugano, Switzerland. The region is served by Milan Malpensa airport (Italy) and by Zurich airport. The train timetable from either of these airports to Lugano main train station (“Lugano, stazione”) is available here. You should calculate a ride of approximately 2h from either airport with slightly shorter connections from Milan Malpensa airport.

Inquiries

Please contact Andreas Jocksch (andreas.jocksch__AT__cscs.ch) for questions related to the EuroHack content, or Tatjana Ruefli (tatjana.ruefli__AT__cscs.ch) for questions related to the logistics of the in-person portion of the event.