Team Workshop

In the morning of the 15th of September, the workshop for RACKlette began. Most people met up at HB and then took the iconic Polybahn together to the CAB, where the workshop was held. There they met up with the rest of the team and partook in fun banter with Hussein, Victor and Harmen. Afterwards, the morning was filled with very informative talks about Spack (held by Harmen), EasyBuild (presented by Victor), and ReFrame (presented by Eirini). All topics that are of course very relevant and applicable for the upcoming competition at SC22 in Texas.

Lunch was had (of course!) at Clausiusbar, the regular lunch mensa for members before the weekly meetings. You could really feel the growing team spirit and the team bond.

After a tasty lunch, everyone headed back to CAB. The talks in the afternoon were centered mainly on optimisations, focusing on both GPU and CPU. A lot was learned, and definitely many valuable insights were gained. Especially the members that are going to compete in November will certainly benefit from all of this new knowledge.

After the talks, it had grown quite late, so everyone had dinner together at a very quaint chinese restaurant. CSCS graciously invited the team to a very delicious dinner, which concluded the first day of the workshop.

The following day was only a half day. A few points about Spack were repeated and tested. We made an initial attempt at getting a competition application to work (LAMMPS), and got some helpful tips and pointers.

Learning so many new things is always very motivating, and definitely a morale boost ahead of SC22. We are all very grateful and thankful that we have such smart and well-versed people supporting us, and once again extend our thanks for their talks and time.