Report on the RIKEN International HPC Summer School 2021 - Toward Society 5.0

From Monday, September 13 to Wednesday, September 15, 2021, the RIKEN International HPC Summer School 2021 was held online. The summer school was first held in FY 2018 as a program to interest students and young researchers in entering the field of computing and related technology, and this year’s summer school was the third time the program was held. (There was no summer school in FY 2019 due to
IHPCSS being held in Kobe.) This year’s summer school had a total of 33 participants, including students (graduate students), researchers, and individuals in the private sector.

Participants learned about parallel programming and execution methods and the skills they need to master them through lectures by Deputy Director Kengo Nakajima (RIKEN), Team Leader Toshiyuki Imamura (RIKEN), Team Leader Kentaro Sano (RIKEN), and researcher Miwako Tsuji (RIKEN). Participants also had the opportunity to experience hands-on training sessions with the supercomputer Fugaku under the guidance of TAs.

• Comments from the participants included, “Learned a lot! Was initially pretty lost but thankfully the lecturers were spontaneous and showed on-screen step-by-step process.,” sometimes it is not easy to follow, but the teachers reply quite fast..
• “I understand that the online setup is really challenging, yet all of the professors are really helpful and patient.,” “The online experience via BlueJeans+Slack felt a little bit impersonal. For future online workshops, using a function like Breakout Rooms in Zoom would be very useful for the participants to work together in small groups and meet each virtually. ”

We hope to welcome many more participants in the coming years!