September 25, 2024 - by CSCS
After a brief welcome and an outline of the agenda, the day kicked off with a keynote by Michele Ceriotti, Associate Professor and head of the Laboratory of Computational Science and Modeling (COSMO) at EPFL. Ceriotti engaged the audience with a talk on “An Integrated Software Platform for Atomistic Machine Learning.”
Following the scientific keynote, the User Lab Day shifted focus to the Alps infrastructure. Maxime Martinasso, Head of Engineering at CSCS, gave a comprehensive presentation on how platforms and services will be provided on the new supercomputer.
The audience then divided into two parallel morning sessions. Ben Cumming, Senior Research Software Engineer at CSCS, discussed how to build and use HPC software on Alps, combining theory with hands-on examples to give attendees a clear understanding of the new computing infrastructure and what to expect. Simultaneously, in another packed room, Juan Dorsch, CSCS Senior Software Engineer, presented on automating HPC workflows using the FirecREST API, a RESTful services gateway for managing HPC resources.
More about Alps!
In the afternoon, Luca Marsella and Tim Robinson, Senior Software Engineers and Service Managers at CSCS, led a session focused on user experience with Alps, covering a range of topics including platforms, policies, the service catalog, user support, and troubleshooting.
The day continued with three more parallel sessions. Nicholas Browning, Research Software Engineer at CSCS, demonstrated how to use Machine Learning (ML) tools in containers on Alps, emphasizing the system’s suitability for Artificial Intelligence and ML workloads. Sebastian Keller and Fabian Bösch, Software Engineers also at CSCS, conducted a session on the Grace-Hopper superchip (GH200), explaining in detail how to develop and run applications on this new architecture.
Andreas Fink and Radim Janalik, CSCS Software Engineers, concluded the program with a session on Continuous Integration (CI) for scientific applications, explaining how to implement CI/CD pipelines and prepare for development.
Next year in Lucerne!
To close the event, Maria Grazia Giuffreda reminded the community of important deadlines for two major events of next year: PASC25 in Windisch on June 16-18, and the next User Lab Day on August 29, again in Lucerne. The day concluded with a lively apero, where CSCS staff, keynote speakers, and participants continued to address concerns, answer questions, and engage in open discussions.