Thematic CERN School of Computing 2023

Jun 11, 2023, 11:00 AM → Jun 17, 2023, 9:00 AM Europe/Zurich

MedILS, Split, Croatia

Alberto Pace (CERN), Kristina Gunne (CERN), Jarek Polok (CERN)

The 12th Thematic CERN School of Computing (tCSC 2023) will take place on June 11-17, 2023.The theme of the school is "Scientific Software for Heterogeneous Architectures" - see the academic programme for more details.

This school is organized by CERN in collaboration with the University of Split. The school will take place in Split, Croatia, and be hosted at the Mediterranean Institute For Life Sciences (MEDILS) Conference Centre. The Centre is a historical renovated building situated in a wooded and landscaped park located on the Adriatic Sea coast, a few kilometers from the centre of Split. 

The School is aimed at postgraduate (i.e. minimum of Bachelor degree or equivalent) students, engineers and scientists with a few years' experience in particle physics, in computing, or in related fields. We welcome applications from all countries and nationalities.

Applications are closed.

Important Dates

• Monday March 13 - applications deadline
• Tuesday April 3 - invitations sent to the selected participants
• Tuesday 2 May - registration fee payment deadline
• Sunday June 11 to Saturday June 17 - the school

              

tCSC2023-poster.png

Sunday, June 11

11:00 AM Registration

12:20 PM Lunch

Registration

1 Welcome and introduction

2 Self presentations

One minute-one slide self presentations

3 Visit of Split old town

7:30 PM Outside Welcome Dinner

Monday, June 12

8:00 AM Breakfast

4 Opening Session

5 Self-presentation: 1 minute per person

10:00 AM Coffee break

6 Preparing for the HL-LHC computational challenge

In this talk we will introduce some basic concepts related to HEP data processing and analysis workflows, seeing them in action in the context of LHC experiments. We’ll also talk about the evolution of the LHC accelerator and experiments. We’ll characterise at a high level what are the consequences of those upgrades for the HEP data processing software, in particular in the context of an evolving hardware and computing infrastructure.

Speaker: Danilo Piparo (CERN)

7 Introduction to efficient computing

Technologies and Platforms - lecture 1

• The evolution of computing hardware and what it means in practice
• The seven dimensions of performance
• Controlling and benchmarking your computer and software
• Software that scales with the hardware
• Advanced performance tuning in hardware

Speaker: Andrzej Nowak

12:20 PM Lunch

1:00 PM Study time and/or daily sports

8 Self-presentation: 1 minute per person

9 Hardware evolution and heterogeneity

Technologies and Platforms - lecture 2

• Accelerators, co-processors, heterogeneity
• Memory architectures, hardware caching and NUMA
• Compute devices: CPU, GPU, FPGA, ASIC etc.
• The role of compilers

Speaker: Andrzej Nowak

3:20 PM Coffee break

10 Technologies and Platforms - exercise

Speaker: Andrzej Nowak

11 Data-oriented design

Technologies and Platforms - lecture 3

• Hardware vectorization in detail – theory vs. practice
• Software design for vectorization and smooth data flow
• How can compilers and other tools help?

Speaker: Andrzej Nowak

7:15 PM Dinner at MEDILS

Tuesday, June 13

8:00 AM Breakfast

12 Writing parallel software

Parallel and Optimised Scientific Software - lecture 1

• Amdahl's and Gustafson's laws
• Asynchronous execution
• Finding concurrency, task vs. data parallelism
• Using threading in C++ and Python, comparison with multi-process
• Resource protection and thread safety
• Locks, thread local storage, atomic operations

Speaker: Sebastien Ponce (CERN)

13 Announcements

10:00 AM Coffee break

14 Modern programming languages for HEP

Parallel and Optimised Scientific Software - lecture 2

• Why Python and C++ ?
• Recent evolutions: C++ 11/14/17
• Modern features of C++ related to performance
• Templating versus inheritance, pros and cons of virtual inheritance
• Python 3, and switching from Python 2

Speaker: Sebastien Ponce (CERN)

15 Technologies and Platforms - exercise

Speaker: Andrzej Nowak

12:20 PM Lunch

1:00 PM Study time and/or daily sports

16 Technologies and Platforms - exercise debriefing

Speaker: Andrzej Nowak

17 Optimizing existing large codebase

Parallel and Optimised Scientific Software - lecture 3

• Measuring performance, tools and key indicators
• Improving memory handling
• The nightmare of thread safety
• Code modernization and low level optimizations
• Data structures for efficient computation in modern C++

Speaker: Sebastien Ponce (CERN)

3:20 PM Coffee break

18 Optimizing existing large codebase - exercise

Optimisation of an existing, production grade large codebase

Speaker: Sebastien Ponce (CERN)

7:15 PM Dinner at MEDILS

Wednesday, June 14

8:00 AM Breakfast

19 Scientific computing on heterogeneous architectures

Programming for Heterogeneous Architectures - lecture 1

• Introduction to heterogeneous architectures and the performance challenge
• From general to specialized: Hardware accelerators and applications
• Type of workloads ideal for different accelerators
• Trade-offs between multi-core and many-core architectures
• Implications of heterogeneous hardware on the design and architecture of scientific software
• Embarrassingly parallel scientific applications in HPC and CERN

Speaker: Dorothea Vom Bruch (Aix Marseille Univ, CNRS/IN2P3, CPPM, Marseille, France)

20 Announcements

10:00 AM Coffee break

21 Student lightning talks

22 Practical vectorization

Parallel and Optimised Scientific Software - lecture 4

• Measuring vectorization level
• What to expect from vectorization
• Preparing code for vectorization
• Vectorizing techniques in C++: intrinsics, libraries, autovectorization

Speaker: Sebastien Ponce (CERN)

12:20 PM Lunch

23 School photo

1:30 PM Outdoor excursion

7:00 PM Excursion dinner

Thursday, June 15

8:00 AM Breakfast

24 Programming for GPUs

Programming for Heterogeneous Architectures - lecture 2

• From SIMD to SPMD, a programming model transition
• Thread and memory organization
• Basic building blocks of a GPU program
• Control flow, synchronization, atomics

Speaker: Dorothea Vom Bruch (Aix Marseille Univ, CNRS/IN2P3, CPPM, Marseille, France)

25 Announcements

10:00 AM Coffee break

26 Performant programming for GPUs

Programming for Heterogeneous Architectures - lecture 3

• Data locality, coalesced memory accesses, tiled data processing
• GPU streams, pipelined memory transfers
• Under the hood: branchless, warps, masked execution
• Debugging and profiling a GPU application

Speaker: Daniel Campora (University of Maastricht)

27 Practical vectorization - exercise

Speaker: Sebastien Ponce (CERN)

12:20 PM Lunch

1:00 PM Study time and/or daily sports

28 Optimisation + vectorization - exercise debriefing

Speaker: Sebastien Ponce (CERN)

29 Design patterns and best practices

Programming for Heterogeneous Architectures - lecture 4

• Good practices: single precision, floating point rounding, avoid register spilling, prefer single source
• Other standards: SYCL, HIP, OpenCL
• Middleware libraries and cross-architecture compatibility
• Reusable parallel design patterns with real-life applications

Speaker: Daniel Campora (University of Maastricht)

3:40 PM Coffee break

30 Programming for heterogeneous architectures - exercise

Speakers: Daniel Campora (Nikhef National institute for subatomic physics (NL)), Dorothea Vom Bruch (Aix Marseille Univ, CNRS/IN2P3, CPPM, Marseille, France)

7:15 PM Dinner at MEDILS

IESC

Friday, June 16

8:00 AM Breakfast

31 Programming for heterogeneous architectures - exercise

Speakers: Daniel Campora (University of Maastricht), Dorothea Vom Bruch (Aix Marseille Univ, CNRS/IN2P3, CPPM, Marseille, France)

10:00 AM Coffee break

32 Programming for heterogeneous architectures - exercise

Speakers: Daniel Campora (University of Maastricht), Dorothea Vom Bruch (Aix Marseille Univ, CNRS/IN2P3, CPPM, Marseille, France)

33 Announcements

34 Programming for heterogeneous architectures - exercise debriefing

Speakers: Daniel Hugo Campora Perez (Nikhef National institute for subatomic physics (NL)), Dorothea Vom Bruch (Aix Marseille Univ, CNRS/IN2P3, CPPM, Marseille, France)

12:20 PM Lunch

1:00 PM Study time and/or daily sports

35 Summary and future technologies overview

Technologies and Platforms - lecture 4

• Teaching program summary and wrap-up
• Next-generation memory technologies and interconnect
• Future computing evolution

Speaker: Andrzej Nowak

3:20 PM Coffee break

36 Exam

4:30 PM Free time

37 Closing Session

7:30 PM Closing dinner

Saturday, June 17

8:00 AM Breakfast

8:30 AM Departure - bus leaves at 8:30