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KTH Center for Scientific Computing (KCSC)

KCSC Summer School 2026

The KTH Center for Scientific Computing (KCSC) welcomes you to the "Introduction to High Performance Computing" summer school. This school is part of the Swedish e-Science Education (SeSE) programme and is supported by the Swedish e-Science Research Centre (SeRC).

The school focuses on the skills needed to utilise high-performance computing (HPC) resources for research. It consists of lectures and guided hands-on lab exercises using the Dardel  HPC system at KCSC. The school includes an introduction to parallel algorithms, parallel programming, modern HPC architectures, performance analysis and engineering, and software engineering. Case studies in various scientific disciplines will be used to help illustrate practical research applications of the topics.

Dates

  • 20-21 August 2026, online, 9:00-12:00

  • 24-28 August 2026, onsite at KTH, 8:00-18:00

Schedule

In general, for the part of the course held at KTH in Stockholm, there will be lectures alternating with hands-on sessions from 8:00-12:00 and 13:15-17:30 most days, followed by guided tour of Dardel and the PDC computer hall.

Location

The lectures and hands-on exercises will be held at KCSC Teknikringen 14, KTH Royal Institute of Technology main campus, Stockholm, Sweden.

Number of places available

The number of places available in the summer school is limited to 25.

Who can attend

Ph.D. students and researchers in scientific and/or high-performance computing (with academic or industrial/commercial backgrounds) from anywhere in the world are welcome to apply to attend the school.

What you will learn

This school provides the knowledge and skills needed to utilise high-performance computing (HPC) resources for research purposes. The school is especially suited to computational and data scientists, and a variety of relevant HPC use cases will be studied to help illustrate the topics. The school consists of both lectures and guided hands-on lab sessions.

By the end of this school, participants will have done and/or will be able to do the following.

  • Describe the architecture of modern supercomputers and the different computing units, including multi-core processors, and graphics processing units (GPUs)

  • Use programming models for shared-memory (OpenMP) and distributed-memory (MPI) programming to develop scientific applications for supercomputers

  • List fundamental principles of GPU programming

  • Understand programming principles of AMD and NVIDIA GPUs

  • Apply software engineering principles to develop scientific applications for supercomputers

  • Practice programming on the KCSC HPC supercomputers

  • Apply the concepts that have been learned to real-world problems

Requirements

Applicants must be able to communicate in English, and have previous programming experience in C/C++ or Fortran. Applicants need to be familiar enough with at least one of these languages to be able to write and execute programs. Basic knowledge of mathematical analysis and linear algebra, and also UNIX/Linux is required.

Applicants who need to refresh their UNIX/Linux skills are recommended to review this introduction to the UNIX shell , which provide an overview of what participants are expected to know before attending the summer school, or this introduction to basic to Linux for new HPC users (link for this will be available here soon).

Participants will need to bring a laptop for participating in the lab exercises.

How to register

To register for the school, fill in the registration form  and payment form .


Deadline for registration and payment of fees: 9 July 2026

Please note that the registration will not be considered complete until we have received your payment.

Fees

The fees for the course cover attendance at all the online sessions, lectures, hands-on sessions and talks, as well as a Dardel tour and refreshments during the tea/coffee breaks.

SeSE Ph.D. student: 1,000 SEK
Note that SeSE doctoral students are Ph.D. students belonging to one of the SeRC or eSSENCE partner universities in Sweden (namely LU, LiU, KTH, KI, SU, UU and UmU).

Ph.D. students from other public research institutions (in Sweden or outside Sweden): 5,000 SEK

Postdoctoral researchers and staff from other public research institutions (in Sweden or outside Sweden): 5,000 SEK

Industry/business researcher: 15,000 SEK

Contact

If you need further information or help in relation to the PDC summer school, please contact hpc-summerschool@pdc.kth.se.

Speakers

Lectures will be delivered by researchers in HPC and computational science, as well as by experts from AMD, NVIDIA, and HPE.