The Computation-based Science and Technology Research Center (CaSToRC) of the Cyprus Institute(CyI), together with the Greek Research and Technology Network (GRNET), organized the 2011Programming Winter School for the Partnership for Advanced Computing in Europe (PRACE) at theCyI Athalassa Campus in Nicosia, Cyprus, between 24-27 January 2010. The school was coorganizedwith the LinkSCEEM-2 project 2011 Advanced Training Workshop.
The Winter School is part of the PRACE-1IP project’s Education and Training task, which aims at preparing and initiating a European High Performance Computing (HPC) education and training program for scalable computing. The school is also part of the LinkSCEEM-2 project training activities aiming to prepare the Eastern Mediterranean scientific community for the use of HPC systems.
The school was very successful with about 65 participants from 14 countries attending the four days of the event. In all, 9 lecturers/trainers from European organisations together with several CaSToRC staff members offered training on a number of topics of interest ranging from MPI, OpenMP, OpenCL (and pyOpenCL) to performance analysis, visualization and parallel program debugging, among others. The program also included a plenary lecture on emerging HPC Trends given by Dr. Norbert Eicker from the Jülich Supercomputing Centre. For the purposes of the hands-on sessions of the school, trainees were given access to a prototype HPC system at CaSToRC.
In their post-school evaluation and general feedback participants were very enthusiastic about the school and expressed their appreciation for the work performed to ensure the high quality of the program and trainers.
This article was first published on www.prace-ri.eu on Monday 16 May 2011.
