Today’s supercomputers are the most powerful calculating machines ever invented, capable of performing more than a thousand million million calculations every second. This gives scientists and engineers a powerful new tool to study the natural world: computer simulation. This free online course will introduce you to what supercomputers are, how they are used and how we can exploit their full computational potential to make scientific breakthroughs.

Register now for the first run on 6th March 2017.

The course is designed for anyone interested in leading-edge computing technology, supercomputers or the role that computer simulation takes in modern science and engineering.

All of the technical aspects will be covered at a conceptual level and there is no requirement to be able to write computer programs. However, anyone with existing programming experience will learn how programming modern supercomputers differs from programming a home PC.

Over five weeks, the course will look at:

• Supercomputers: introducing supercomputing terminology and some of the largest machines in the world.
• Parallel computers: how they are built from hundreds of thousands of CPUs, each similar to those in a desktop PC.
• Parallel computing: using parallel processing to harness the power of all of those CPUs for a single calculation.
• Computer simulation: how we can perform virtual experiments to make real-life predictions.
• Case studies: how supercomputing is making scientific breakthroughs that were never possible before.

This course has been developed by the Partnership for Advanced Computing in Europe (PRACE) and the Edinburgh Parallel Computing Centre (EPCC) at The University of Edinburgh in collaboration with SURFsara from The Netherlands.

PRACE coordinates many of the largest supercomputers in Europe, so has world-leading experience of the benefits that supercomputing can bring.

EPCC is a PRACE partner, operates the UK national supercomputer ARCHER and has a long history of developing and delivering training.