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4th LinkSCEEM General User Meeting June 2014

4thLinkSceem1The Computation-based Science and Technology Center (CaSToRC) of The Cyprus Institute, the EU funded FP7 project Linking Scientific Computing in Europe and the Eastern Mediterranean (LinkSCEEM-2) and the Cy-Tera project co-financed by the European Regional Development Fund and the Republic of Cyprus through the Research Promotion Foundation organized the 4th LinkSCEEM general user meeting. The user meeting was held during 10 -13 of June 2014 at the Cyprus Institute premises in Nicosia, and aim to prepare the Eastern Mediterranean scientific community for the use of HPC (High Performance Computing) systems.

The training targeted young researchers from Cyprus and the region and addressed programming training needs of current and prospective HPC users from the Eastern Mediterranean. LinkSCEEM-2 offered 20 fellowships on a competitive basis to young researchers to attend the general user meeting. In total 34 participants, both local and regional, participated in the meeting.

Highlights from the meeting

The program was balanced between theoretical and hands-on training sessions to enable deep understanding of the concepts and their application on modern HPC. For the hands-on sessions participants were given access to Euclid, the regional training cluster of the LinkSCEEM project, where they had the chance to carry out the exercises and practice what they have learned.

During the first two days of the event the participants received training from the Software Carpentry team (http://software-carpentry.org). The training included short tutorials alternate with hands-on practical exercises on Version control, Unix shell and Python. The training offered by the Software Carpentry instructors covered the computational skills needed to be productive in a small research team.

The third day was dedicated to OpenMP Programming. Introductory and advanced OpenMP concepts were introduced, along with hands on exercises. For this, LinkSCEEM funded a specialized trainer from Fermi lab, US, to join the workshop. Finally, the forth and final day of the event was dedicated to more advance parallel programming focusing on Accelerator Programming with Compiler Directives and more precisely OpenMP 4.0 for accelerators and OpenACC directives for GPU programming.

All participants visited the hybrid supercomputer cluster Cy-Tera and were given an overview by local experts of how a Supercomputer works. The workshop also included targeted sessions on how scientists can access the available computational resources.

4thLinkSceem2

 

Group picture of the participants.