Applications now being accepted for computational summer school

Graduate and doctoral students from all disciplines can learn more about using multicore processors and graphics processing units to speed up their applications and improve their productivity during a hands-on summer school offered by the Virtual School for Computational Science and Engineering. The Summer School on Accelerators for Science and Engineering Applications will be held Aug. 18-22, 2008, at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA / www.ncsa.uiuc.edu) on the campus of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Applications are being accepted online (at www.greatlakesconsortium.org/events/GPUMulticore/) through May 19, 2008. Because hands-on instruction is central to the summer school, a limited number of students (approximately 40) will be selected for participation. Applicants will be notified of acceptance by June 30. The target audience for this summer school includes graduate and doctoral students from all disciplines who want to use multicore processors and graphics processing units for new and exciting applications projects, as well as those who want to develop programming tools and future designs of these processors. The goal is to provide students with knowledge and hands-on experience in developing applications software for processors with massively parallel computing resources. By end of the summer school participants will: • Understand algorithm styles that are suitable for accelerators. • Understand the most important architectural performance considerations to developing applications. • Be exposed to computational thinking skills for accelerating applications in science and engineering. • Gain ability to engage computing accelerators on science and engineering breakthroughs. The summer school will be led by co-instructors Wen-mei Hwu, the Sanders-AMD Endowed Chair in Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and David B. Kirk, chief scientist at NVIDIA Corporation. There is no fee for the summer school. Students are responsible for their own travel and lodging costs but are encouraged to seek support from their home institutions. For complete information, go to www.greatlakesconsortium.org/events/GPUMulticore/. Questions? Email accelerator@ncsa.uiuc.edu or contact Umesh Thakkar, 217-333-2095. This is the first of several annual summer school events to be offered by the Virtual School for Computational Science and Engineering, which is part of the educational effort associated with the National Science Foundation-funded Blue Waters project. NCSA is collaborating with IBM and the Great Lakes Consortium for Petascale Computation to build and deploy Blue Waters, a sustained-petascale supercomputer for open scientific research. The Virtual School will help train the next generation of computational researchers so they can take full advantage of Blue Waters and other advanced computational resources.