Introduction
Historically, High Performance Computing (HPC) was primarily about computing-intensive processing, opposed to data-intensive jobs. Nowadays, complex HPC simulations combine these two attributes: Large-scale modelling as a rule performs demanding computations on very large data sets. Moreover, a new subset of HPC jobs occurs, searching for useful information and patterns in the data itself – high-performance data analysis. Data becomes the focus of HPC. PRACE Winter School 2015, presenting HPC Tools for Data Intensive Processing, reflects this development.
The PRACE Winter School 2015 will take place on 12 – 15 January 2015 at the campus of VSB - Technical University of Ostrava, Czech Republic, being organized jointly by the National Supercomputing Center IT4Innovations, VSB - Technical University of Ostrava and PRACE.
About the programme
The School’s programme offers a portfolio of tutorials (sessions), in which students will learn the best practices and techniques that are crucial to work with exponentially growing data sizes.
The first and largest session, High Performance I/O, will start with parallel I/O in general, teach serial and parallel HDF5 and then focus on ADIOS, a middleware that already helped many applications achieve high performance I/O.
In the Analytics session, we shall get acquainted with the R language, called the "lingua franca" of data analysis and statistical computing, and its recent high performance extensions enabled by the "Programming with Big Data in R" (pbdR) project.
The optional Visualization session introduces VisIt, a turnkey tool for large scale simulated and experimental data sets, going far beyond pretty pictures.
The Visualization session (as well as some advanced add-ons of High Performance I/O and Analytics sessions) will run in parallel with another optional session, Hadoop. If you make this choice, you will enter the world of distributed processing and unstructured data storage and follow a paradigm shift in the way how data in large-scale data-centers and clouds is processed through the MapReduce model.
The tutors invited to the PRACE Winter School 2015 are distinguished scientists and experts in the focus of the School. Many of them give tutorials at the Supercomputing Conference (SC) series in the US or at the International Supercomputing Conference (ISC), its European conterpart.
Two social events will be offered to the participants. On Monday evening, a Welcome reception will take place in the patio of the new IT4Innovations building. On Wednesday, we shall visit the former Anselm Mine, nowadays hosing the largest mining museum in the Czech Republic. The dinner will be served in the nearby Harenda Miner’s Pub.
See Programme in the menu on the left for further details.
Prerequisites and Registration
Applicants are expected to be active developers/programmers of HPC applications dealing with large data sets. Thus, the prerequisites include working skills in (parallel) programming and some experience with big data processing. The attendees are encouraged to bring a poster on their work related to the topics of the school.
The school participants will be selected by an addmission committee based on information they provide through a registration form (accessible via menu on the left). The registration deadline is December 8, 2014. The selection procedure will be performed on the fly, and applicants will be informed about the result usually within three weeks after the registration, one week after the registration deadline at the latest. The number of the School's participants is limited to forty.
The registration is closed.
The participants are expected to bring their own laptops for the hands-on exercises, with Virtual Box >= 4.3.4 installed. Please install this software in advance, there will be no time to install it on spot before the School starts on Monday. Virtual Box can be downloaded from https://www.virtualbox.org/wiki/Downloads.
Be sure that you have at least 10 GB free disk space for the virtual machine itself.
Remarks
The school is offered free of charge to students, researchers and academics residing in PRACE member states and eligible countries. Lunches, coffee breaks and social events are included. It is the responsibility of the attendees to arrange and cover travel and accommodation. The school's official language is English.
