ACADEMIA

Want to learn how to use graphics processors for scientific computing? Scale your parallel code to tens of thousands of CPU cores? Deal with ginormous datasets? The Virtual School of Computational Science and Engineering offers these courses and more during its summer program for 2010!

Since 2008, nearly 250 students and researchers have participated in the annual Summer School offered by the Virtual School. During Summer School, students learn new techniques for applying high-performance computing systems to their work. Due to overwhelming demand for courses in previous Summer Schools, we have added 15 sites (for a total of 21 sites) to the 2010 program in order to accommodate additional students. For each course, students attend on-site in one of 10 state-of-the-art, distributed high-definition (HD) classrooms, located at academic and research institutions across the country. These HD classrooms are equipped with live, high-definition videoconferencing technology that provides a high-quality learning experience.

Students attend technical sessions presented by leading researchers in computational science and engineering and use cutting edge, high-performance computing systems provided by TeraGrid resource providers. Course participants apply the techniques learned in hands-on lab sessions, assisted by skilled teaching assistants who work one-on-one and in small groups to answer questions and solve problems posed during the sessions. This summer’s courses are:

• Petascale Programming Environments and Tools, July 6–9, 2010
• Big Data for Science, July 26–30, 2010
• Proven Algorithmic Techniques for Many-core Processors, August 2–6, 2010

The cost for each course is only $100. To participate, prospective students must first be enrolled in the Virtual School. Enrollment is free and can be completed at https://hub.vscse.org/. After enrolling, students select their courses and indicate which of the distributed HD classrooms they would like to attend.

Snacks and an evening reception will be provided; participants are responsible for travel and lodging costs (low-cost dorm accommodations will be provided where possible). Because of the large geographic diversity of participating sites, it is likely that little travel will be required.

For no additional cost, on-site participants can take online short courses on MPI, OpenMP, and CUDA that are designed to help them meet course prerequisites.

For more information on the 2010 courses, including the sites participating in each course and details on enrollment, go to: www.vscse.org/summerschool/2010