SNIC Accepted as a PRACE Training Centre

Between 2010 and 2020, PRACE established ten PRACE Training Centres (PTCs) in the Czech Republic, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Ireland, Italy, the Netherlands, Spain and the United Kingdom to make PRACE training widely available across Europe. These centres collectively provide a coordinated programme of training courses about high-performance computing (HPC) and computational science for European researchers.

The demand for PRACE training courses has increased over time. Therefore, PRACE decided to increase the number of training centres. In October 2019, PRACE opened a call to establish additional PTCs. The new training centres would be required to implement a collective training programme jointly coordinated by PRACE, where each PTC would focus on subject areas that would be of particular relevance or interest to industry and/or the research communities in their local area and in the surrounding region. Each training centre would be expected to deliver two or three training events annually, totalling up to nine training days per year.

Usually, the PRACE PTC courses need to fulfil the following requirements.

• Every PTC course is open to all researchers, free of charge (for participation).

• Course material is mostly in English and is made available on the PRACE Training Portal where feasible.

• Courses are delivered verbally in English to ensure accessibility, although verbal instruction may be given in a local language as long as there is sufficient justification to do so.

• Each PTC course is set up on the PRACE website so there is consistency in terms of providing course details, and collecting information (for example, for registrations or evaluations).

• Each PTC course is usually 1-3 days in duration, which means a PTC programme should not consist of a series of half-day courses.

SNIC with three of its centres – PDC at the KTH Royal Institute of Technology, the National Supercomputer Centre (NSC) at Linköping University (LiU) and the High Performance Computing Centre North (HPC2N) at Umea University (UmU) – applied to the PRACE call to become a PRACE training centre. In January 2020, PRACE made its decision and four more countries now have PTCs:

• Austria (VSC Research Center, Vienna University of Technology),

• Belgium (the Flemish Supercomputer Center, VSC, & the CÉCI consortium of Belgian HPC centres),

• Slovenia (HPC Center Slovenia), and

• Sweden (SNIC with PDC, NSC and UmU).

The SNIC PTC has now prepared its preliminary training plan for the spring 2020 - spring 2021 period. Please note that due to COVID-19 restrictions, the training courses are currently being run online. In the future, we hope to hold these training courses both face-to-face and online, taking into account the success of recent and current online training. Be aware that this list is preliminary and the dates for the autumn 2020 - spring 2021 courses may change.

The confirmed courses are announced on the web pages of each SNIC centre as well as on the PRACE training events web page. More information is available on the following pages.

• events.prace-ri.eu/category/2
• www.pdc.kth.se/about/events
• www.hpc2n.umu.se/events/courses
• www.nsc.liu.se/support/Events