About
The International HPC Summer School on Challenges in Computational Sciences (IHPCSS) is a series of events started in 2010 and taking place yearly. Initiated by NSF's TeraGrid and EU's DEISA project, the first school was organized in Italy in 2010, and was then continued by NSF's XSEDE and EU's PRACE projects with locations alternating between North America and Europe. Initially starting with a total of 60 graduate students and post-docs from Europe and the US, this number was increased to 70 students in 2013 when Japan joined in through RIKEN and then further increased to 80 students in 2014 when Canada additionally joined initially through Compute Canada/Calcule Canada, with a transition to the SciNet HPC Consortium Canada in 2018. As of 2023, Australia joined IHPCSS through support by the Pawsey Supercomputing Research Centre. As of 2024, support for EU participants is handed over from PRACE to EuroHPC JU. With the end of the XSEDE project, US support has been taken over by the ACCESS project. A few seats from UK will be sponsored by EPCC, and from South Africa by CHPC.
Selection of students takes place after an open call typically published in December/January. Typically, a high diversity of science areas and more than 20 nationalities from many different continents are represented.
The objective of the Summer School is to familiarize the best students of the respective continents or countries in computational sciences with a strong bond to supercomputing with all major state-of-the-art aspects related to HPC for a broad range of scientific disciplines, catalyze the formation of networks, provide mentoring through faculty members and supercomputing experts from renowned HPC centers, and to facilitate international exchange and open further carrier options.