Training and education

EPCC is hosting a Software Carpentry boot camp on 3-4 December 2013. The boot camp is designed to teach software development skills to researchers, helping them to do more in less time and with less pain.

Here at EPCC we are very excited about the PGAS2013 conference which is being held in Edinburgh on the 3rd and 4th of October. This will be the 7th international PGAS conference and, as always, it will be a great chance for those in the community to discuss latest developments in the field and their research.

Since June 2012, The Software Sustainability Institute and Software Carpentry have been working with the DiRAC consortium to develop a "driving test" or basic software skills aptitude test. The test is now ready to be rolled out across DiRAC, the UK's integrated supercomputing facility for theoretical modelling and HPC-based research in particle physics, astronomy and cosmology.

The SoHPC programme offers undergraduate and junior postgraduate university students the opportunity to spend two months of the summer at an HPC centre in a PRACE partner country. Students undertake a visualisation project, which is based on the outcomes of PRACE technical work or other work using PRACE resources.

This week I was in Bath to lead a Software Carpentry boot camp organised by Software Sustainability Institute fellow, Alex Chartier. I was joined by Chris Woods from the University of Bristol, who made his instructor debut. The SSI fellow Manchester fellow, Michael Croucher, also came along to help out.

EPCC's MSc in HPC student team participated in the ISC13 Student Cluster Challenge at Leipzig from 16-19 June. This was the very first time that MSc students from EPCC (and from the UK!) had joined the Student Cluster Competition.

Eight teams from China, Costa Rica, Germany, Sourth Africa, UK and US were there to compete for three awards:

The PRACE Summer of HPC is a placement programme for undergraduate and postgraduate students. This post was written by Nicolas Cuello, one of the students who attended the training week here at EPCC. 

After a hard-working day of OpenMP, we decided to do some “extreme” sport. The SoHPC climbing team (see pic) was formed by Vojtech, Lukas and me (Nicolas). We decided to go to a gym recommended by Nix called Alien Rock. The particularity of this place is that the wall is inside a church, something which is very unusual.

If you have an interest in training researchers to use computing, software or data, you should attend the workshop for e-Infrastructure trainers on 14 August.

Twenty four students from all over Europe are just embarking on the PRACE Summer of HPC. Before splitting up and heading off to 10 different European HPC centres to spend two months working on their HPC projects, they are all gathered together here at EPCC to do an intensive week's HPC training as part of the PRACE Advanced Training Centre programme.

Here they are resplendent in their SoHPC T-shirts ...

17-18 July 2013
EPCC, The University of Edinburgh

OpenMP is the industry standard for shared-memory programming, which enables serial programs to be parallelised using compiler directives.

This two-day course is aimed at programmers seeking to deepen their understanding of OpenMP and explore some of its more recent and advanced features.