Source: Own illustration
The PPCES (Parallel Programming in Computational Engineering and Science) has been held at the IT Center since 2001 and has been a great success!
This year’s workshop took place as an NHR4CES event and in cooperation with hpc.nrw, EDIH Rheinland and WestAI. It was mainly aimed at HPC beginners who develop or analyze HPC codes. In order to cater to the different interests of HPC developers, the PPCES week was divided into three sections as usual: two days of shared memory programming with OpenMP, two days of distributed memory programming with MPI and one day on machine learning (ML) and deep learning techniques.
Back to the roots
Since last year, PPCES has once again been held exclusively in person. This has the great advantage that our HPC experts can respond much better to the individual needs and questions of the participants, especially in the hands-on components, and thus the learning effect of the workshop is greater.
Such an event also benefits from the networking that can take place during the breaks over coffee and snacks.
Our participants are always interested in exchanging experiences, which can only develop its full potential at a face-to-face event. We would like to take this opportunity to thank our cluster manufacturer NEC, who sponsored the catering for our participants this year.
In the future, PPCES will continue to return to an event on the premises of the IT Center, as it did before the pandemic, in order to maintain the charm of face-to-face events. So if you secure one of the coveted places for next year, we look forward to welcoming you!
Source: Own illustration (Ruud van der Pas and Christian Terboven)
Lecturers and evaluation
Of particular note was our guest speaker Ruud van der Pas (Oracle Linux Engineering), who had great success with his lively presentations on OpenMP Monday and Tuesday. The OpenMP presentations at PPCES even made it into the official OpenMP newsletter of March 2024. We were also able to win Jannis Klinkenberg as a new speaker for the PPCES ML Friday.
The subsequent evaluation of the event shows that not only we – as the organizers – but also the participants were satisfied with the content of the workshop. The various parts were evaluated at the usual high level.
The so-called “Overall Value” of the OpenMP Days was rated with an average of 4.55 points, the MPI Days with 4.31 points and the ML Day with 4.08 points (out of a maximum of 5 achievable points). The speakers will incorporate further feedback from the evaluation before the next event.
We are already looking forward to PPCES 2025!
Dunja Gath and Sandra Wienke are responsible for the content of this article.
Leave a Reply