The National Institute for Computational Sciences

NICS and JICS Offer a Free One-day Crash Course in Supercomputing

The University of Tennessee’s National Institute for Computational Sciences (NICS) and the Joint Institute for Computational Sciences (JICS) are presenting a free “One-day Crash Course in Supercomputing” on March 8 and 15 at JICS on UT-Knoxville campus, 206 Hallam Auditorium, Claxton Education Building, from 9 a.m. to 4 p.m.

The training is designed to give students a brief introduction to the concepts of high-performance computing, as well as introduce the tools and methods for using high-performance computers to solve scientific problems.

In part one of the course, students learn to program, compile and run code in a UNIX environment. In part two, they learn to write parallel programs that can be run on a supercomputer.

Registration can be accomplished via the course web page, which also provides a link to a map showing the location of the Claxton Education Building, the course agenda and other general information. Questions may be directed to to Misha Sekachev (mikhail@utk.edu).

The first of the three offerings of the NICS/JICS "One-day Crash Course in Supercomputing," which covers the same material each time, took place on March 1; the others will be on March 8 and 15. A combination of informative talks and hands-on learning, the training covers the topics of HPC in the context of scientific computing, concepts of parallel processing, an introduction to UNIX/LINUX, programming basics with C, and an introduction to message passing interface (known as MPI). Instructors for the course are Bobby Whitten and Daniel Lucio of NICS User Support, as well as Christian Halloy and Misha Sekachev of the JICS support staff. Lucio is shown answering a student question while Whitten provides class instruction.