NERSCPowering Scientific Discovery for 50 Years

Crash Course in Supercomputing, June 23, 2025

June 23, 2025

This hybrid training, as part of the 2025 Berkeley Lab Computational Sciences Summer Student Program, is also open to NERSC, ALCF, LANL, and OLCF users. This training is geared towards novice parallel programmers. 

Overview

In this course, students will learn to write parallel programs that can be run on a supercomputer. We begin by discussing the concepts of parallelization before introducing MPI and OpenMP, the two leading parallel programming libraries. Finally, the students will put together all the concepts from the class by programming, compiling, and running a parallel code on one of the NERSC supercomputers. Training accounts will be provided for students who have not yet set up a NERSC account.

Date and Time: Monday, June 23, 2025, 9:00 a.m. - 4:00 p.m. (PDT)

Crash Course Agenda

Morning Session

Time (PDT/UTC-7) Topic Presenters
09:00 - 9:30 am Welcome and Introduction to Parallel Programming Concepts

Rebecca Hartman-Baker, PhD (NERSC)

Charles Lively, PhD (NERSC)

Yun He, PhD (NERSC)

09:30 - 09:45 am Understanding Supercomputer Architecture Charles Lively, PhD (NERSC)
09:45 - 10:15 am Basic Parallelism & MPI Rebecca Hartman-Baker, PhD (NERSC)
10:15 - 10:30 am

BREAK

 
10:40 - 11:15 am MPI Collectives Charles Lively, PhD (NERSC)
11:15 - 12:00 pm

Q&A and Interactive Exercises Practice

Rebecca Hartman-Baker, PhD (NERSC)

Charles Lively, PhD (NERSC)

Helen He, PhD (NERSC)

12:00 - 01:00 pm

LUNCH

 

Afternoon Agenda

Time (PDT/UTC-7) Topic Presenters
01:00 - 02:00 pm Introduction to OpenMP Helen He, PhD (NERSC)
02:00 - 02:45 pm OpenMP + Hybrid Introduction Rebecca Hartman-Baker, PhD (NERSC)
02:45 - 03:00 pm

BREAK

 
03:00 - 04:00 pm 

Interactive Exercises/Hands-On Practice- Github Repo:

https://github.com/NERSC/crash-course-supercomputing.git

Rebecca Hartman-Baker, PhD (NERSC)

Charles Lively, PhD (NERSC)

Helen He, PhD (NERSC)

Registration

Please register here.

Program Materials

TBA