A look back at the EPCC HPC Summer School 2025

^{Students of our 2025 HPC Summer School with Prof. Mark Parsons, EPCC's Director, at the Bayes Centre.}

In this article I’ll summarise how the School operated this year. We hope to run a similar event again in summer 2026, with applications invited a couple of months in advance.

Selection

The call for applications from UK undergraduates opened in early April. This year we required students to have at least one full year of study remaining to try to align the background knowledge of the class. We offered 15 places from almost 130 applicants and were pleased to welcome students from a wide variety of backgrounds in subjects including Computer Science, Software Engineering, Physics, Aeronautics and Mathematics. Participants came from universities all over the UK including Belfast, Newcastle, Leeds, Edinburgh, London, Manchester, Birmingham, Southampton and York.

Logistics

Our School ran for two weeks from Saturday 14–Saturday 28 June. As well as paying for their travel and accommodation, we also gave students a £35 daily stipend to cover living costs. The University accommodation was self-catered and less than ten minutes’ walk from EPCC's base in the Bayes Centre building.

Lectures and practical sessions mostly took place in Bayes, with some sessions at the nearby Lister Learning and Teaching Centre of the University of Edinburgh. 

What did the students learn?

After covering an introduction to the Unix shell (based on material from HPC Carpentry) and a refresher to programming in Python and C, we went on to cover the basics of HPC architectures and parallel programming using OpenMP, GPU offloading and finally MPI. With accounts on our Cirrus HPC system, students could apply all these techniques to a number of real-world applications including image processing and computational fluid dynamics simulations.

We also had a trip to the Advanced Computing Facility to show them real hardware such as Cirrus and ARCHER2, as well as the ongoing preparations to host the next UK National Supercomputer. The £750M award for this future system was finally confirmed the week before the School began, which was perfect timing for the visit.

The School concluded with a morning of guest lectures by EPCC staff including “The Role of Research Software Engineers in Public Engagement” by Kirsty Pringle, and “Understanding and Reducing Carbon Emissions from HPC Systems” by Andy Turner. Given the recent funding announcement, we were very pleased that EPCC’s Director, Mark Parsons, was able to open this final session, talking about “The Next UK National Supercomputing Service: Plans for an Exascale Machine in Edinburgh”.

Was it a success?

Our students enjoyed unusually sunny and warm weather for Scotland! I hope they also learned about interesting and useful aspects of computational science and HPC that they will carry with them into their future studies and careers.

We all enjoyed teaching the students and I think they enjoyed learning about HPC. I was very impressed with how much they learned in such a short space of time. The ACF visit was definitely a highlight, and I know all the students enjoyed spending a couple of weeks in the centre of Edinburgh – we benefit so much from being located close to many popular tourist locations, museums and galleries.

Subject to funding availability, we're keen to run the EPCC HPC Summer School again in 2026.

^{Some of this year's HPC Summer School students with ARCHER2, the UK's National Supercomputing Service.}

From our students

“What was your highlight?”

“The highlight of this experience was touring the Advanced Computing Facility - standing beside ARCHER2 and getting an insider's look at the infrastructure being prepared for the upcoming exascale system was truly inspiring!” Savvas

“The hands-on approach. I really liked the amount of practicals we had and the amount of time we got to actually learn on the big machines. The people were also a massive plus - I made some really amazing friends and connections in my time there.” Juniper

“Would you recommend the HPC Summer School?”

“I would highly recommend it! I learned a lot in such a short period of time, and I am now confident in exploring high performance computing in greater depth independently. I think it is especially beneficial to those coming from a physics background, as many important aspects of computational thinking were covered, that are often neglected in physics courses.” Anonymous

“Yes, the whole team was very helpful and welcoming. The experience overall was great.” Anonymous

“Yes, it is fully funded and you get to learn in the facilities of a top University with staff that are passionate about the subject. You also get to learn by using tech that is not avaible normally with Cirrus, providing a unique and top class experiance.” Finnian

“Yes! As a physics student, it was a great opportunity to get more hands-on computing experience and learn something outside of my course-content.” Jana

“Yes. Visiting Edinburgh while doing this fantastic course is a wonderful experience.” Aryan

“Yes! The course is very well structured, and as a physics student, I feel like this has been an invaluable opportunity, and I have learnt much that I would not have been taught otherwise. I've also had a wonderful time in general, connecting with the other students in summer school, and with our lovely teachers.” Angelina

“I would absolutely recommend the EPCC HPC Summer School to students seeking an unforgettable, hands-on experience with HPC. From the passionate staff to the lasting friendships made throughout the two-week programme, this truly was a one-of-a-kind opportunity.” Savvas

“Absolutely! I had an amazing time inside and outside of the lectures and practicals. This was a great opportunity that I am very grateful to have had.” Juniper

^{Below: Students on the famous Edinburgh hill Arthur's Seat at sunset.}

Links

EPCC is a leading provider of high performance computing and data science education and training in Europe. Learn more about what we can offer you: 
https://www.epcc.ed.ac.uk/education-and-training