IUCC hosted the successful PRACE 2021 Winter School – Converging HPC Infrastructure & Methodologies. Due to Covid-19 safety precautions, the advanced training HPC event was held online via Zoom on December 7-9, 2021. Forty-nine participants hailed from Israel and dozens more researchers from 19 countries across Europe, India, Syria and Turkey.
The focus of the training program was to provide an introduction and overview of how to use PRACE resources and the impact of converging HPC infrastructures in dynamic cloud-based environments. Instructors from Israel’s academic community delivered sessions on classic HPC programming methodologies, as well as newer techniques in working with massive AI applications using cloud infrastructures. The training event integrated HPC in the cloud sessions and tools jointly developed with AWS Europe. A cadre of highly-skilled HPC solutions and developer architects led hands-on tutorials on a wide range of practical tools and subjects. This training model, based on collaboration between academia and a commercial vendor, is perhaps one of the first of its kind.
“I am very proud this conference was led by IUCC’s excellent team with experts from Israel and abroad,” says Nati Avrahami, incoming IUCC CEO. “Our goal is to increase the number of these kinds of events and to contribute to the integration of researchers from Israel and researchers from around the world.”
Special thanks to the the Weizmann Institute of Science IT Division for providing the HPC resources.
IUCC represents Israel as a member of PRACE – the Partnership for Advanced Computing In Europe since January 2013, and promotes and facilitates use of these HPC compute resources in the academic community. IUCC has hosted previous PRACE Seasonal School in 2017 and 2014.