RACKlette's 2025 Kickoff Trip to CSCS

It’s become a bit of a tradition in the RACKlette team: to kick off the new season and welcome new members, we take a trip down to Lugano to visit the Swiss National Supercomputing Centre (CSCS). This year was no different—and with the Gotthard Base Tunnel back in action, we even shaved off a good chunk of travel time compared to last year (yay for Swiss infrastructure!).

The train ride was, as always, a great way to ease into the day. Between the mountain views, lakes, tunnels, and occasional sleepy faces, it was a perfect mix of relaxing and productive. Some of us caught up on conversations or played cards, while others—less lucky—were still busy working on their applications for ISC 2025 (the deadline is sneaking up fast!).

Once we arrived at CSCS, we kicked off with a guided tour of the facilities. Seeing the ALPS supercomputer up close was impressive—and loud. We learned how it’s cooled with water from Lake Lugano (760 liters per second!), and even got to hold an NVIDIA Grace Hopper (GH200) chip. Spoiler alert: it’s heavier than it looks.

Of course, we also took our traditional team photo—always fun to compare with previous years and see how much the group has grown.

For lunch, it had to be pizza. Being in the Italian-speaking part of Switzerland has its perks, and nobody complained about following it up with a scoop (or two) of gelato.

The afternoon was all about diving into the basics of High-Performance Computing. Our more experienced members gave hands-on presentations on the Unix filesystem, bash, SSH, and how we set up and interact with clusters. Topics like SLURM, MPI, and OpenMP are coming soon, but this was a great starting point.

We were also lucky to be joined again by our advisor at CSCS, Hussein Harake, who shared his insights and answered questions in a session that was both chill and informative—just the way we like it.

One of the most memorable moments was visiting the server room. It’s one thing to talk about computing power; it’s another to actually see the machines in action, feel the temperature difference, and hear just how loud things get when supercomputers are running full tilt.

All too soon, it was time to head back to Zurich. The return trip gave everyone time to wind down—some slept, some chatted, and some probably kept thinking about their ISC applications (we see you!).

All in all, it was a great day to welcome our new team members: Shivram Sambhus, Mia Sophie Zerdick, Declan Shine, Elena Aschmann, Anqi Liu, Dimetri Chau, Pierre Pang, Neli Tsokanova, and Bennet Meyer. And a big thank you to our returning team members—Yannik Rüfenacht, Bogdan Murgu, Ioana Popa, Joanne Azariah, Yi Zhu, Leonard Schmidt, Alexander Sotoudeh, Nick Schaller, Hannes Eberhard, Faveo Hörold, and Marcel Ferrari—who helped make the day run smoothly.

Huge thanks to CSCS for hosting us, and to Hussein Harake for being such a great supporter of the team. Here's to an exciting year ahead with Team RACKlette!