PRACE – Training

PRACE is engaged in a wide range of pan-European training activities to develop skills and competences related to HPC and computational science. It has several approaches to conduct this training:

Face-to-face Training Events

All upcoming PRACE face-to-face training events can be found at Training Events. They are mainly focused on general HPC skills and competences aimed at intermediate to advanced users of HPC. Some introductory courses are still included in its training programme. PRACE training courses are open to participants affiliated with institutions from the Member States (MS) of the European Union (EU) and Associated/Other Countries to the Horizon 2020 programme.

PRACE organises annually a programme of 90+ courses via its 14 PRACE Training Centres (in Austria, Belgium, Czech Rep., Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Ireland, Italy, the Netherlands, UK, Slovenia, Spain, Sweden). It is complemented by Seasonal Schools and special On-demand events run in collaboration with other projects and European Centers of Excellence (CoEs).

Every year, PRACE also collaborates with partners from Canada (the SciNet Consortium), Japan (RIKEN R-CCS) and the U.S. (XSEDE) to organise the International HPC Summer School for the world’s brightest talents in HPC along with world-leading computational scientists and HPC instructors.

The Summer of HPC programme

Since 2013, the Summer of HPC programme is aimed at stimulating interest in HPC among students by providing an initial 1-week training course followed by working in a European HPC centre abroad for approx. 2 months in the summer (July – August).

Online/Remote Learning

PRACE has developed online training resources that are accessible globally. These resources include:

  • PRACE Tutorials – short tutorials on a few HPC subjects
  • PRACE MOOCs – are regularly organised on the FutureLearn platform.
  • Training material repository – this contains files (e.g. presentations, notes, hand-outs) that are typically aggregated from past PRACE training events.

The PRACE Training Strategy – A Summary

With the increasing importance of HPC in various fields of science and industry, PRACE has central role in proving state-of-the art training for European HPC ecosystem. PRACE focuses on advanced training, which targets to exploiting the pre-exascale and future exascale systems. However, training users with more basic or intermediate HPC skills and competences is needed to maintain and grow the user community with new and emerging user groups on a national and international level.

PRACE will place special emphasis (~40-50% of its investment on face-to-face training) on offering courses for advanced user community of European Tier-0 HPC users. These will be offered on a regular, sustained basis by the PTCs, the International HPC Summer School, and special workshops/schools that will pool together European HPC training expertise.

About half of the investments in face-to-face training, mainly offered by PTCs and Seasonal Schools, will be on intermediate level courses that will attract 1,400 participants per year. PRACE support ensures that these courses are offered and advertised on a pan-European basis, free-of-charge and organised in a coordinated manner.

PRACE will maintain and develop online resources that will provide pan-European information on face-to-face courses, training material, sample codes, online tutorials, etc. The cornerstone will be the PRACE Training Portal to facilitate users. There is also tremendous potential for PRACE partners to pool their training expertise to develop MOOCs to attract a global audience for its training offerings. Finally, PRACE will continue its outreach programme to universities to stimulate interest in HPC training among undergraduate students.

–> Download the full PRACE Training Strategy, as conceived in May 2018. This document will be reviewed and updated from time to time taking into account the evolving HPC eco-system and landscape.