The Costa Rica HPC School 2023, organized by CeNAT in collaboration with the RISC2 project, took place between January 30 and February 3, at the Costa Rica National High Technology Center. The main goal of the School was to offer a platform for learning the fundamental tools and methodologies in parallel programming. In doing so in an in-person mode, networking and team building was also fostered. The School gathered 32 attendees, mostly students, but also professors and researchers.
Building on the success of previous editions, the seventh installment of the Costa Rica High Performance Computing School (CRHPCS) aims at preparing students and researchers to introduce HPC tools in their workflows. A selected team of international experts taught sessions on shared-memory programming, distributed-memory programming, accelerator programming, and high performance computing. This edition had instructors Alessandro Marani and Nitin Shukla from CINECA, which greatly helped in bringing a vibrant environment to the sessions.
Bernd Mohr, from Jülich Supercomputing Centre, was the Keynote Speaker of this year’s edition of the event. A well-known figure in the HPC community at large, Bernd presented the talk Parallel Performance Analysis at Scale: From Single Node to one Million HPC Cores. In an amazing voyage through different architecture setups, Bernd highlighted the importance and challenges of performance analysis.
For Esteban Meneses, Costa Rica HPC School General Chair, the School is a key element in building a stronger and more connected HPC community in the region. This year, thanks to the RISC2 project, we were able to gather participants from Guatemala, El Salvador, and Colombia. Creating these ties is fundamental for later developing more complex initiatives. We aim at preparing future scientists that will develop groundbreaking computer applications that tackle the most pressing problems of our region.