PRACE, the Partnership for Advanced Computing in Europe, has selected six of its member's sites as the first PRACE Advanced Training Centres. The mission of the PRACE Advanced Training Centres (PATCs) is to carry out and coordinate training and education activities that enable the European research community to utilise the computational infrastructure available through the organisation. The long-term vision is that such centres will become the hubs and key drivers of European high-performance computing education.
The chosen sites are Barcelona Supercomputing Center, Spain; CINECA - Consorzio Interuniversitario, Italy; CSC - IT Center for Science, Finland; EPCC at the University of Edinburgh, UK; Gauss Centre for Supercomputing, Germany; and Maison de la Simulation, France. In addition to providing education and training opportunities for computational scientists in Europe, the training centres are also the main bodies responsible for producing materials for the PRACE training portal: www.prace-ri.eu/training.
‘Contemporary HPC systems offer unprecedented computing power and their architectures are constantly evolving. The on-going challenge has always been to up skill scientists and programmers to maximise efficiency and research output on such systems,’ said Dr Simon Wong, leader of the training work package in PRACE-2IP and Head of Education and Training at ICHEC in Ireland. ‘PRACE has shown its commitment to address this challenge by establishing the PATCs to significantly expand its training programme.’
There will be at least one PRACE PATC in operation at any one time, but the geographical locations of centres, assessed every two years, will vary over time. Training events may also be organised at locations external to PATC hosting sites.
