Helmholtz  GPU Hackathons are five day intensive hands-on events designed to help computational scientists to develop applications on GPUs using libraries, OpenACC, CUDA and other tools by pairing participants with dedicated mentors experienced in GPU programming and development.

The Helmholtz Association pursues the long-term research goals of the state and society, including basic research, in scientific autonomy. To do this, the Helmholtz Association conducts top-level research to identify and explore the major challenges facing society, science and the economy. Its work is divided into six research fields. The Helmholtz Association brings together 19 scientific-technical and biological-medical research centers. With more than 42,000 employees and an annual budget of over € 5 billion, the Helmholtz Association is Germany's largest scientific organisation. The Association's work follows in the tradition of its namesake, the natural scientist Hermann von Helmholtz (1821-1894).

Representing distinguished scholars and preeminent institutions around the world, these teams of mentors and attendees work together to realize performance gains and speedups by taking advantage of parallel programming on GPUs.

The event is jointly organized by Helmholtz-Zentrum Dresden-Rossendorf (HZDR) and Jülich Supercomputing Centre (JSC) in association with the Helmholtz Federated IT Services Software Cluster (HIFIS).

Prerequisites

• Teams are expected to be fluent with the code or project they bring to the event and motivated to make progress during the hackathon. 
• No advanced GPU skills required, but teams are expected to know the basics of GPU programming and profiling at the event. A collection of GPU lectures, tutorials, and labs are available for all participants at no fee. Please contact organizers for more information to help you prepare for the hackathon. 

GPU Compute Resource

Teams attending the event will be given access to a GPU cluster for the duration of the hackathon. If participants prefer they can use their own GPU resource at the event.

Event Format and Attendance

The Helmholtz GPU Hackathon will be hosted online with all times Central European Time (CET). Each team will be assigned to a virtual breakout room to work with mentors on their codes and will present reports (SCRUMS) on their progress to all participants in the main virtual meeting space daily. 

If your team is accepted for the hackathon, registration information will be provided along with mentor introductions and computational resource access. Accepted teams should:

• Register all team members for the event.
• Review the attendee guide.

To get a better idea of what the virtual GPU Hackathon will be like, check out this blog post  on the first virtual hackathon in the series hosted by San Diego Supercomputer Center.

Find out more information of the Helmholtz GPU Hackathon 2021 at https://bit.ly/2XdCYtz and submit your application at https://bit.ly/3bcNJ7F.