Purdue University

Purdue will host a no-fee virtual summer school on improving the performance of parallel applications run on high-performance computing systems like Purdue’s community clusters.

The sessions are aimed at students, post-doctoral researchers, faculty and staff looking to gain skills in evaluating and tuning their code. The Performance Tuning Summer School will take place from 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. August 17 to 21 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 virtual summer school will cover performance engineering theory and examples; performance modeling; workflows and tools to evaluate and tune code; tuning hybrid programs; and more. It includes lectures and labs that allow attendees to immediately apply what they learn. Participants should have basic programming and Linux command line skills.

Participants register through the National Science Foundation 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 at portal.xsede.org.

For more information about the virtual summer school at Purdue, email rcac-help@purdue.edu.

The performance tuning sessions are part of the Virtual School of Computational Science and Engineering (VSCSE) Supercomputing for Everyone Series. VSCSE is a national program for participants from almost any field, including researchers and practitioners from fields such as the physical, biological, economic and social sciences as well as engineering.

The virtual school is delivered nationwide using high-definition video conferencing to allow students to interact in real time with course instructors and to work in person with fellow computational scientists and local experts. At Purdue, staff from ITaP Research Computing will be on hand. VSCSE, the National Science Foundation and ITaP are the event’s sponsors.

Stephen Harrell, the scientific application analyst who coordinates training for ITaP Research Computing, says the performance tuning workshop is just one of the research computing training events on tap at Purdue in coming months, including:

• The 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. Register here for the Oct. 6 seminar, and for the Oct. 7 lab register here. Attending the seminar is a pre-requisite for the lab.