RACKlette Workshop

On a foggy Friday morning in September, we met for a workshop organised by Hussein Harake and other experts from CSCS. Strengthened by several cups of coffee, we dived into the world of High Performance Computing (HPC) right on time at 9.00 am. After the introduction, Theofilos Manitaras introduced us to the HPL and HPCG benchmarks using containers. We learnt what benchmarks and containers are, the differences between HPL and HPCG, as well as their use and purpose.

Andreas Jocksch then gave us an introduction to the MPI library and its application. He gave an insightful demonstration of how powerful and efficient MPI can be for parallel programming and how we can use it in our own projects and tasks. After an intensive morning, we had our well-deserved lunch in the Andreas Tower. During lunch we were able to talk to the experts from CSCS and learn more about their work. At 13:00 Andreas continued his presentation on MPI. The third and last presentation was given by William Sawyer. He explained a lot about ICON, a powerful modelling framework for weather, climate and environmental predictions. This talk was particularly relevant to an application in the SC24 competition we were taking part in.

After the informative and interesting presentations, we had the opportunity to continue working on our own applications and ask the experts for advice on any problems that arose. Overall, the workshop was both intensive and very productive and we learnt a lot from it. A big thanks to Hussein for the organisation and to all the speakers who helped us in the world of HPC.