PRACE, the Partnership for Advanced Computing in Europe, organizes a Winter School on Petascale Computing from February 10-13, 2009 at the training Center of the Hellenic Telecommunications Organization (OTE Academy) in Athens, Greece.

The event is hosted by the Greek Research and Technology Network (GRNET) with contribution from the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki (AUTH), and addresses potential users of future Petascale systems in Europe. Researchers and students from Europe and beyond will receive advanced training in programming models and optimization techniques, MPI/OpenMP and hybrid programming, and profiling. The first three days of the Winter School will focus on the in-depth presentation for thorough understanding of these HPC topics during morning lectures followed by hands-on training in the afternoon. The last day will be dedicated to a novel multiprocessor architecture, with all-day parallel lectures and hands-on training.

To enable students to solve problems in scalable scientific computing, access will be provided to two PRACE prototype systems: The Power 6 system at the SARA Computing and Networking Services in Amsterdam, The Netherlands, and the Cell system at the Barcelona Supercomputing Center (BSC) in Spain.

"As HPC is gaining more and more interest both in Europe and worldwide, it is straightforward that the training needs on HPC topics will grow proportionally. The PRACE project is leading the HPC efforts in Europe and one of its main axes has been the formulation of high level training sessions, which will allow participants to improve their HPC skills and get in touch with the latest technological achievements at the same time. This constitutes the objective of the Winter School, and the main idea, according to which the School's program has been defined." says Nikos Tsakiris, the chair of the PRACE Petascale Winter School Program Committee and application expert at GRNET/AUTH.

The Winter School is part of the PRACE project's education and training program, which aims at preparing and initiating a European HPC education and training for scalable computing. It follows the very the successful Summer School held in Stockholm, Sweden, and includes advanced topics identified in the recent survey on HPC training and education needs that PRACE has carried out.

Registration for the Winter School is open, at this web site. The number of participants is limited to 40, and a PRACE Admission Committee will be responsible for selecting the students.

Please check the Important days Section of this web site for deadline details.

Contact: prace-winter-pc at-no-spam fz-juelich.de