The Gray Scott free HPC summer school is back at LAPP in summer 2025, with all courses in English
After the first two successful editions, the Gray Scott school is back at LAPP from 23 June to 4 July 2025! This year, all the courses will be delivered in English, and students will be able to chose from attending at LAPP in Annecy with the teachers, in many European cities on dedicated satellite sites, or remotely by following the courses live online.
The Gray Scott HPC Summer School
LAPP, as part of the ESCAPE Collaboration work programme, and in collaboration with the CC-FR Competence Centre, is organizing the third Gray Scott School from 23 June to 4 July 2025. This summer school on High Performance Computing, in a unique format and entirely free of charge, will be dedicated to programming and optimization on Heterogeneous Architectures.
The school will cover the optimisation of computations on different types of hardware (CPU, GPU), presenting their respective characteristics, architectures and bottlenecks. It will cover generic optimisation methods applicable to all types of hardware, as well as the various libraries, technologies and languages available to achieve the best possible performance. Ideally, the peak performance of the machine.
- Hardware: CPU, GPU
- Languages considered: C++17, C++20, CUDA, Fortran, Rust, Python, Julia
- Libraries considered: SYCL, Eve, Numpy, cunumerics, legate, Jax, Thrust, cuPy, pycuda and PyTorch
- Compilers considered: G++, Clang++, nvc++, gfortran, nvfortran, dpc++.
- Profiling tools: Valgrind, Maqao, Perf, NSight, Malt and NumaProf
All the methods will be illustrated on simple examples, such as Hadamard products, reductions, barycentre calculations and matrix products, in order to be applied to a single problem: the simulation of a Gray Scott reaction.
This problem is simple enough to be understood quickly and complex enough for compilers to have difficulty optimising it without help. Each method will be broken down into a simple version, using default options, and one or more advanced versions, which will allow their advantages and disadvantages to be discussed and quantified.
How to attend the Gray Scott School 2025
This intensive or à la carte training course can be followed in three different ways:
- Face-to-face at LAPP in Annecy with the trainers – including a BootStrap day (solving your programming/optimisation problems). Read this article to catch a glimpse of the students’ experience in 2024.
- Distance learning at various satellite sites in Europe (more information to come)
- Distance learning, à la carte, via a live streaming on YouTube, with a discord server set up to foster interactions between students and teachers.
Please bear in mind that for on-site registration, you need to make sure that your organisation allows your travel, and that you have made all necessary arrangements. The number of seats on every site is limited to the capacity of the hosting place.
Prepare for the school: the Gray Scott Thursdays webinars
Leading up to the summer program, we’re hosting a special series of 17 webinars called « Gray Scott Thursdays » focused on Unit tests, CPU & GPU Architecture, Computing precision, Memory allocation, CPU & GPU computing with Modern C++, Rust, Fortran, Python and Sycl, also EVE and CUDA…
These weekly sessions will:
- Introduce key topics from the courses
- Give you an update of the most known languages and libraries
- Develop your skills and give you the chance to meet our incredible professors
Whether you’re looking to expand your expertise, solve a problem or connect with a vibrant community of learners, the Gray Scott School adds value for everyone.
Register here to get all the information and links for the next webinars.