Boost your calculations with the first French-speaking MOOC on supercomputers: join the second session

Following on from the successful first edition, Centrale Nantes is offering a new session of the 'Boost your calculations' MOOC. Join in to discover what a supercomputer is, how to use it, what benefits it offers and how to introduce parallelism in your calculation codes.

From September 12, 2022 to December 4, 2022 All day

During this 5-week course offered by Centrale Nantes, the concepts will be tackled in a fun and simple way with plenty of illustrations and interaction. You will be guided through this new world of HPC via short videos presenting the concepts, but also fun exercises, self-assessments and numerous interactions on the Forum or during live sessions. You will also study more advanced notions to be implemented in practical cases. Finally, you will develop your first parallel codes.
   

See the trailer



Supercomputers have long been used for numerical simulation, to carry out experiments on a computer which would be costly and/or dangerous under real conditions. The creation of 3D animation or special effects is also very demanding in terms of computing resources and can therefore benefit from the power of supercomputers. Another more recent application is linked to the rise of Artificial Intelligence with a neural network training phase that requires this type of equipment.

For all these applications, and many others, the efficient use of supercomputers requires new concepts and experience to open up the world of high performance computing.

This MOOC has been designed to address these needs.

At the end of this course, you will be able to:
 
  • Understand parallel computing and its applications
  • Describe how a supercomputer works
  • Work in the supercomputer environment
  • Identify whether your favourite software is parallelised 
  • Identify projects that could benefit from supercomputing
  • Use computing resources optimally to optimise and share them
  • Run applications on multiple cores
  • Differentiate between MPI and OpenMP parallel programming libraries 
  • Write programs adapted to supercomputers
 Whether you are a student, a researcher, or just curious, this Mooc is for you!
 

Feedback from the first edition

During the first edition, among the 1500 participants (from 55 countries), 92% of the learners were satisfied with the content and 84% would recommend this MOOC to someone looking to discover the world of supercomputers, understand parallel computing and its applications. New for this second session: live sessions will be held every week with the participants.

The staff

  • Hugues Digonnet: Associate Professor│GeM Institute, Centrale Nantes
  • Mathieu Gesta: Educational designer│ RFI Atlanstic 2020, University of Nantes
  • Pierre-Emmanuel Guérin: Technical manager of the high performance computing platform│GeM Institute, Centrale Nantes
  • Dominika Jankosikova: Multimedia educational designer│Centrale Nantes
  • Lucas Lestandi, Associate Professor│GeM Institute, Centrale Nantes
  • Romain Plourde: Videographer │Centrale Nantes
  • Richard Randriatoamanana: Research engineer│LS2N Laboratory, CNRS
Published on September 9, 2022 Updated on October 19, 2023