International High Performance Computing Summer School 2016

University Of Tennessee Knoxville, Knoxville TN

Investigators

Abstract

Part 1: PI's propose to participate in the 7th annual International HPC Summer School at the University of Ljubljana in Ljubljana, Slovenia on June 26-July 1, 2016. The vision of the International High Performance Computing Summer School 2016 is to prepare a larger, more diverse, HPC workforce for the nation, in cooperation with Canada, Europe, and Japan. This is a joint effort of the Extreme Science and Engineering Discovery Environment (XSEDE), Compute Canada, the Partnership for Advanced Computing in Europe (PRACE), and the RIKEN Advanced Institute for Computational Science (AICS). These organizations propose to work together to immerse 80 graduate students and postdocs from Canada, Europe, Japan, and the United States within a Summer School on HPC challenges within computational sciences. 30 of the students will come from U.S. institutions. The participants and presenters will benefit from the experiences and lessons learned from previous Summer Schools as the organizers continue to improve program content and community building activities. Based on feedback from participants in past years, we anticipate that the 2016 participants will gain new intellectual insights through the formal and informal interactions with one another. The students will be briefed on how to gain longer-term access to national resources and services to support their on-going research endeavors. The participants will also gain deeper insights into the cultures of other countries, which will benefit them in establishing strong international collaborations. The Summer School is organized to foster the development of new collegial friendships and new collaborations among the participants and presenters, locally and globally. The attendees will share and learn from one another during and after the Summer School through the use of social networking tools, virtual seminars, and participation in new collaborations and partnerships that are formed. The materials developed for the summer school will be made publicly available for community access. Specific innovations for 2016 include enhanced recruitment of women, with a revamping of the application and review process, review of IHPCSS structure and presentations, and data collection and study by the external evaluation team. Therefore, the project serves the national interest, as stated by NSF's mission, to promote the progress of science. Part 2: Participants will be selected through a rigorous application process, based on the potential for the International Summer School for High Performance Computing to enhance their understanding of HPC challenges in computational and data sciences and to advance their research methods and practices. Participants will talk with scientists from multiple disciplines about their challenges and opportunities in utilizing HPC to advance their research. The participants will engage in hands-on activities to become familiar with HPC tools they may use to improve their own research practices while participating in five days of large and small group discussions to address the challenges in advancing HPC research. The participants will be assigned mentors from among the presenters and HPC professionals and they will be provided with numerous opportunities for informal discussions with mentors. The Summer School offers a unique experience designed to prepare the attendees to become effective, contributing members of international research and development teams.