Training Activities Offered by the EuroCC National Competence Centre Sweden

The EuroCC National Competence Center Sweden (ENCCS) started on 1 September 2020 as one of 33 national nodes of the EuroCC project. The mission of ENCCS is to develop competence, knowledge and support in Sweden to enable academic and industrial researchers and high-performance computing (HPC) users to take advantage of forthcoming (pre-)exascale EuroHPC resources as well as modern artificial intelligence (AI) and high-performance data analytics (HPDA) methodologies.

A key part of this mission will be to deliver training events for HPC/AI/HPDA users and developers who aim to scale up their workloads or adapt their HPC/AI/HPDA software to new or different hardware platforms. ENCCS and SNIC will be collaborating and finding synergies in these activities within Sweden, for example by coordinating events, harmonizing training material and working together on outreach and dissemination. The training portfolio of ENCCS will largely be focused on topics which are rarely covered in existing SNIC training, including intermediate/advanced level training in MPI, OpenMP and CUDA, but will also include introductory/intermediate level training in AI and HPDA methods. If these efforts go according to plan, a coherent HPC training curriculum will emerge with regular courses following a clearly defined level specification which will assist researchers to develop from novice HPC users to parallel programming gurus!

ENCCS is also planning to host three hackathons in the coming two years. Research groups developing HPC code will be invited to submit proposals for hackathon projects and the proposals that are accepted will be assigned one or two mentors who will work with the group for a week. ENCCS aims to host one hackathon in collaboration with NVIDIA that will focus on GPU computing and another, together with Intel, on OpenMP in the first year, and a hackathon dedicated to AI in the autumn of 2022.

A tentative plan for upcoming ENCCS events is as follows.

• October 2020: Fundamentals of CUDA C/C++
• December 2020: Advanced MPI
• January 2021: Advanced GROMACS topics
• February 2021: Practical Deep Learning
• March 2021: Nek5000 training
• March 2021: GPU bootcamp with NVIDIA
• April 2021: OpenMP hackathon with Intel

To stay up to date on ENCCS activities, you can visit our website at enccs.se , subscribe to our newsletter ( eepurl.com/heQCiv ) or follow the project on Twitter ( twitter.com/EuroCC_Sweden ) or LinkedIn ( www.linkedin.com/company/enccs ).