A new advanced training offer by the Universities of Stuttgart, Freiburg and Ulm as well as Sicos BW GmbH trains engineers and computer scientists in dealing with supercomputers. It has been designed as a blended-learning format and can be taken parallel to employment.
Electric cars, quieter airplanes, more efficient power plants – many developments today are inconceivable without supercomputers. Supercomputers play a decisive role in product development and in design. Engineers use supercomputers for simulation calculations with highly complex requirements. The fields of application of such simulations cover a wide range: meteorology, wind energy or medicine to name but a few. However, the use and programming of supercomputers is anything but trivial.
The experts from the Supercomputer Centre at the University of Stuttgart (HLRS) know this too; the Centre operates the most powerful supercomputers in the world; they developed the idea into a supercomputing advanced training offer for industry. Funded by the EU and the State of Baden-Württemberg, a unique advanced training offer is currently being developed in a joint project with the Universities of Freiburg and Ulm as well as Sicos BW GmbH with the Supercomputing-Academy, which is attractive for the large concerns as well as for small and medium-sized businesses alike.
The special feature: the offer by the Supercomputing-Academy has been designed as a blended learning format. This means that only a small part of the training takes place in face-to-face training sessions. In around 80 percent of the learning time the participants can educate themselves further online in a flexible manner and travel expenses and time are greatly reduced.
On 19th April 2018 the Academy with start with the first module “Parallel Programming”. The participants will then learn online with interactive learning scripts, animations, programming exercises and explanatory videos over a period of 15 weeks and discuss their questions with the lecturers in virtual meetings.
Leaning contents on code development will thereby be on parallel systems for application programmers in the centre. Know-how will be imparted on the architecture of parallel systems and programming models such as MPI or OpenMP as well as the ability to efficiently use program libraries and central parallelisation concepts.
In the framework of the training program on high-performance computing, the following additional models are in the pipeline:
- Simulation
- Visualisation
- Performance Optimisation
- Cluster, Cloud and Supercomputers
- Ecology and Economy
- Data Management
The project is funded by the Ministry for Social Affairs and Integration Baden-Württemberg from funds made available by the European Social Fund as well as by the Ministry of Science, Research and Art, Baden-Württemberg.