JSC Guest Student Programme on Scientific Computing

As one of the leading HPC centres in Europe, the Jülich Supercomputing Centre hosts regular support activities and educational programmes in the field of Scientific Computing. One of the main priorities of these events is to introduce young academics to HPC and its applications in scientific research.

During the last eleven years, JSC has of fered a very successful Guest Student Programme on Scientific Computing. Each Summer since the year 2000, between eight and eleven international students have had the opportunity to tackle exciting and challenging scientific projects in the field of HPC under the supervision of scientists from JSC, the NIC Research Group, and other institutes at Forschungszentrum Jülich. In some cases, the programme impact was such, that a number of students returned to JSC as Master or PhD candidates in order to pursue a career in HPC. Furthermore, many JSC cooperations began as a guest student project.

In 2011, the 12th JSC Guest Student Programme took place from August 01 to October 07. This year, it was co-sponsored by the Centre Européen de Calcul Atomique et Moléculaire (CECAM) and organized in cooperation with the German Research School for Simulation Sciences (GRS). Out of an again significantly increased number of excellent international applicants, 12 students from Germany, Italy, Croatia, Israel, and India joined scientists from JSC, NIC, and GRS for ten weeks. While their original scientific areas ranged from Physics, Mathematics, Chemistry, and Computer Science, their projects covered simulation, visualization, data mining, and algorithm development as well as hardware porting studies.

Besides the intensive use of JSC’s reliable workhorses JUGENE and JUROPA, the newly installed GPU cluster JUDGE also played an important role this time: three projects were dedicated to GPU-based algorithms. Therefore, the traditional courses on distributed and shared memory parallel programming and performance optimization were complemented by a workshop on exploiting the capabilities of graphics processing units.

The participants had the opportunity to present and discuss their work with other students and scientists during a concluding colloquium. Additionally, more detailed reports have been prepared and were compiled into a printed JSC publication, which is also available online.

Next year’s JSC Guest Student Programme will start on August 06, 2012. It is open to students from the natural sciences, engineering, computer science and mathematics after their Bachelor and before reaching their Master’s degree. The application deadline has been set to April 30, 2012. Additional information as well as the reports of previous years can be found on www.fz-juelich.de/ias/jsc/gsp

• Mathias Winkel
Jülich Supercomputing Centre

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