SCL's Milos Nikolic and Dusan Stankovic attended the PRACE "Hybrid programming on Massively Parallel Architectures" winter school, which lasted from 6. - 10. February 2012 at CINECA supercomputing center near Bologna, Italy. It was an intense, 5 day, graduate level course in high performance computing, organized in the framework of the European project PRACE.

The school was focused on hybrid programming for the best exploitation of massively parallel architectures. Topics covered in lectures were: massively parallel architectures (with example of IBM BlueGene/Q), accelerators (NVIDIA GPU, Intel MIC), advanced MPI topics, hybrid programming with OpenMP and CUDA. Also, some use cases were presented. There was a series of hands-on sessions where participants could learn how to use various HPC tools and resources (such as Scalasca profiler and PLX cluster). The participants were given access to PLX cluster with some amount of core-hours (PLX is a hybrid CPU/GPU supercomputer with NVIDIA Tesla cards), so that applications that use hybrid model could be tested in real settings.