Purdue University

Purdue will host a National Science Foundation high-performance computing summer boot camp June 16-19 for faculty, staff and students wanting to learn more about tools for working with research supercomputers like Purdue’s community clusters.

The sessions will take place from 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. each day in the Envision Center, Stewart Center, Room B001, which is located off the tunnel between the Stewart Center and the Purdue Memorial Union. Space is limited so participants should register soon. There is no cost to register. The National Science Foundation and ITaP are sponsoring the event.

The mini course will cover MPI, OpenMPI, OpenACC, accelerators, and other high-performance computing tools and include hands-on exercises. At the conclusion, a contest will challenge participants to apply their skills over the following three weeks for a chance to win the XSEDE Summer Boot Camp Championship Trophy. Purdue is the only site in Indiana hosting the boot camp.

Participants register with the National Science Foundation’s Extreme Science and Engineering Discovery Environment (XSEDE), in which Purdue is a partner. A free XSEDE account can be created on the XSEDE user portal portal.xsede.org.

The tools covered are widely employable on research supercomputers, including those available through XSEDE and Purdue’s Community Cluster Program machines, among them the new Rice and Snyder clusters.

The boot camp is part of a series of high-performance computing training sessions ITaP sponsors at Purdue through XSEDE, says Nikki Huang, who coordinates training for ITaP Research Computing.

The sessions are delivered nationwide using high-definition video conferencing to allow students to interact in real time with course instructors from the Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center and the National Center for Supercomputing Applications and to work in person with local colleagues and experts. At Purdue, staff from ITaP Research Computing will be on hand.

In addition to being equipped for video conferences, ITaP’s Envision Center specializes in technology and techniques such as data visualization and analysis; virtual simulation; human-computer interaction; and media creation, including video, animations and publication-quality stills.

Other research computing training events on tap at Purdue this summer and fall include:

• The Virtual School for Computational Science and Engineering (VSCSE) Supercomputing for Everyone Series: Performance Tuning Summer School, Aug. 17-21. Covers basic knowledge of performance modeling, prediction and verification for supercomputer users.
• The Virtual School for Computational Science and Engineering (VSCSE) Supercomputing for Everyone Series: Science Visualization, Aug. 24-25. Covers aspects of visualizing data from a variety of domains.
• Parallel Programming and Optimization with Intel Xeon Phi Coprocessors, Oct. 6 (seminar) and Oct. 7 (hands-on lab), sponsored by ITaP and Intel. Introductory seminar on using Intel’s Phi accelerators to speed research codes.

For more information, email rcac-help@purdue.edu.