New Scotland-German academic exchange scheme wins funding
7 April 2026
EPCC been awarded funding by a joint RSE-DAAD (Royal Society of Edinburgh and German Academic Exchange Service) scheme for exchange visits between Scotland and Germany for students and researchers.
The project (called KERSE: Knowledge exchange to render sustainable exascale-HPC) will fund visits over the next two years, between EPCC and our collaborators at Juelich Supercomputing Centre (JSC) led by Dr Brian Wylie.
Over many years JSC has developed Scalasca, a software tool that is important for understanding how scientific programs perform on large supercomputers. As EPCC will host the next national supercomputer, we want to ensure we are up-to-date with all of Scalasca's newest features so we can better support our users, and JSC will therefore develop training to be delivered to EPCC staff. One focus is to understand the performance of non-blocking MPI collective routines, for example as used in the FEniCS package. In return JSC staff will benefit by seeing how Scalasca works on software of importance to EPCC that they haven't seen before. This will help direct the future development of Scalasca.
We are also linking this activity to our ongoing work with Women in HPC (WHPC). WHPC was initiated by EPCC, and JSC runs their own very active chapter. Through these links we aim to develop training that will be available to as diverse an audience of HPC practitioners as possible.
The project will kick off soon, with JSC staff visiting EPCC for two weeks in May 2026.
