USI joins the first European Master's programme in High Performance Computing

A consortium of European partners led by the University of Luxembourg has been selected by the EuroHPC Joint Undertaking to design and implement the first pan-European High-Performance Computing (HPC) pilot Master’s programme. Università della Svizzera italiana is a member of the consortium that will offer courses from Autumn 2022 to provide students with outstanding career perspectives in the rapidly expanding field of HPC, High-Performance Data Analytics (HPDA), or Artificial Intelligence.

Olaf Schenk, Professor of Computer Science at the USI Institute of Computing, comments: "This initiative will be integrated into the Master of Computational Science at USI. Our graduate students will be fully supported by the EUMaster4HPC project in terms of living costs, tuition fees, mobility costs, industrial internships, etc. It will give our Master's students access to a European network of leading universities active in the area of computing and data science. We will also receive funding for our CSCS-USI summer school, which had over 120 participants this year, mainly students from USI, ETH Zurich, FAU Erlangen, and other Swiss and European universities. The EU project also supports the creation of teaching material for High Performance Computing and Data Analytics courses".

The EU-funded initiative is supported at USI by the Institute of Computing (CI) and the Computer Systems Institute (SYS) at the Faculty of Informatics. ETH Zurich and the Swiss National Supercomputing Centre (CSCS) are participating in the project as contributing university/center. ETH Zurich will also integrate a number of USI teaching courses within its Master of Computational Science and Engineering.

With a total budget of 7 million euros, the consortium of European universities, research/supercomputing centres, and industrial partners will develop a higher education programme with the main objectives to (1) train students in areas such as the design, deployment, operation, and/or the use of current and future generation HPC and HPC-related technologies in Europe; and (2) to train experts skilled in driving HPC adoption and knowledge transfer in industry and academia in different strategic domains, thereby linking HPC activities in industry and academia.

While many university curricula include basic computer science and programming languages, education programmes today must be adapted to a rapidly developing HPC technology ecosystem. The curriculum of the HPC pilot Master’s programme will be designed in a modular structure to enable full or partial integration of the modules into new or existing Master’s programmes. The availability of HPC proficient data scientists, HPC application developers, and expert users, is a key factor that drives digital transformation in Europe and requires the training of highly skilled and talented graduate students.

Background

The consortium led by the University of Luxembourg consists of universities, research/supercomputing centres, industrial and SME partners, and additional supporting partners. Eight universities will initially be awarding degrees: University of Luxembourg, Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya, Politecnico di Milano, Friedrich-Alexander-Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg, Sorbonne Université, Sofia University St. Kliment  Ohridski, Università della Svizzera italiana, Kungliga Tekniska Hoegskolan). It was selected following the call for proposals EuroHPC-2020-03 "Training and Education on HPC", which was launched in March 2021, as the last R&I call of the EuroHPC JU within the 2014-2020 Multiannual Financial Framework.

About the EuroHPC JU

The EuroHPC JU was established by Council Regulation (EU) 2018/1488 in 2018. 29 European countries are currently taking part in the initiative and pooling their resources with the EU and private partners to enable the EU to become a world leader in supercomputing. The mission of the EuroHPC JU is to develop, deploy, extend and maintain an integrated world-class supercomputing and data infrastructure in the EU and to develop and support a highly competitive and innovative HPC ecosystem. More information can be found on the EuroHPC JU’s website