Post-PASI training in Chile
See the News announcement (in Spanish) of the course at the host university website.
Find lecture slides online and follow the links for recorded lectures on iTunes U.
The intense two weeks of the PASI in January 2011 covered a broad range of topics, from basics of CUDA programming, parallel linear algebra and fast N-body algorithms, to a selection of computationally intensive applications.
The institute generated such great interest locally, that the HPC group at Universidad Técnica Federico Santa María (UTFSM) was motivated to organize a follow-on training event. They invited PASI organizer, Prof. Lorena Barba, to lead such an effort.
The post-PASI training is taking place from August 8 to September 3rd, and will cover the basics of the GPU architecture and CUDA programming, use of libraries such as CUSP and Thrust, and applications.
The series of 10 lectures and 8 hands-on lab sessions is being instructed by Prof. Barba’s PhD student Christopher Cooper, who is a graduate of UTFSM in Mechanical Engineering. He first visited Prof. Barba at University of Bristol in 2008 as a fellow of the EU-funded project “Scientific Computing Advanced Training”, and then applied to Boston University for PhD studies, which he started in January 2010. Christopher is a recipient of Becas Chile, awarded by CONICYT.
This new one-month CUDA course at UTFSM has garnered tremendous interest. The maximum capacity of 25 participants was quickly reached, and email messages continued pouring from interested students up until the first day of classes; unfortunately, there were not enough places to accommodate everyone. The limited capacity is dictated by the hands-on lab sessions, which are carried out with access to a small cluster locally with 8 GPUs, and with guest access to Boston University’s 32-GPU bungee cluster.
Participants in the course come from various departments at UTFSM, from nearby Universidad de Valparaíso and Universidad Católica de Valparaíso, and even as far as Universidad de Concepción and the ALMA observatory, in Atacama.
A detailed syllabus of this intense course is available for each week of activities (including lecture slides and references). Note that the course is being instructed in Spanish, but the lecture slides are in English.
Screencasts are being uploaded shortly after each lecture, using the PASI collection of media on iTunes U.