SCIENCE

The first European US Summer School on HPC Challenges in Computational Sciences organized jointly by Europe's DEISA project and the US/NSF TeraGrid project took place at Santa Tecla Palace in Acireale, Sicily, from Oct 3-7, 2010.

Among the participants were sixty graduate students or post-docs, selected from more than 100 applications: 25 from US and 35 from EU universities and research institutions. Students came from a variety of disciplines, among them astronomy, atmospheric sciences, chemistry, computer science, engineering, mathematics and physics. Female students were represented with a fraction of 20 percent.

Twenty-five high level speakers were covering major fields of computational sciences, with nine speakers from the US and sixteen from Europe. Areas covered included Challenges by Scientific Disciplines, Programming, Performance Analysis & Profiling, Algorithmic Approaches & Libraries, and Data Intensive Computing and Visualization.

"The summer school HPC Challenges in Computational Sciences was an excellent opportunity for me to get an overview of the complete spectrum of high performance computing and computational science. Attending talks from the large number of distinguished speakers from almost every domain of computational science and high performance computing has enabled me to get a very clear idea of the current trends in the area," one of the students stated afterwards.

To hold a joint EU US summer school was suggested by leading computational scientists from both continents. "Our primary objective for the student experience was to advance computational sciences by enabling and stimulating future international collaboration, innovation, and discovery through the most effective use of HPC," said Hermann Lederer from the DEISA coordination team at RZG, Garching.

"We hope to continue with such events every year -- alternating between EU and US destinations," said TeraGrid Forum Chair John Towns, National Center for Supercomputing Applications. "The overwhelmingly positive feedback of the students -- 85 percent rated the event as very good or excellent -- can be taken as a mandate," he added.