CSCS User Lab Day 2025 – Meet the Swiss National Supercomputing Centre

Dear Members of the CSCS User Community,

We would like to invite you to join CSCS Staff for the event “CSCS User Lab Day 2025 – Meet the Swiss National Supercomputing Centre”, to be held on Friday, August 29, 2025, at the Hochschule  Luzern, located in Luzern, Switzerland. The event will end with an apero to allow further discussions and questions. 

Lucerne University of Applied Sciences and Arts – Social Work
Inseliquai 12B
6002 Lucerne

Agenda

10:00 – 10:25 Registration and Coffee

10:25 – 10:30 Welcome and Agenda

10:30 – 11:15 Scientific Keynote: "Nanoscale Device Simulation at the Exascale", Professor Mathieu Luisier, ETH Zurich 

11:15 – 11:45 Plenary Session: "Engineering the User experience on Alps”  Dr. Jonathan Coles, CSCS

11:45 – 12:45 Morning Parallel Sessions: 

1. How to Use and Build HPC Software at CSCS: a Practical Introduction, Dr. Ben Cumming, CSCS

• User environments
  • Intoduction to the software stack provided by CSCS on Alps
    • CPE
    • UENV
  • A practical guide to using uenv:
    • How to find, pull, start and use in SLURM jobs
    • Using UENV provided by CSCS
    • Building software with uenv: spack, views and modules

2. Interactive Computing on Alps, Dr. Tim Robinson, Prashanth Kanduri, Juan Dorsch, CSCS 

• Introduction to using Jupyter notebooks via JupyterHub
• Best practices for setting up VSCode on Alps vClusters 
• FirecREST web portal and recent improvements

12:45 – 13:45 Lunch

13:45 – 14:30   Plenary Session: "General Information for Users on Alps", Dr. Luca Marsella, CSCS

• Introduction of Platforms
• Policies and Service Catalogue
• Documentation and Troubleshooting
• Community Slack space and Status Page

14:30 – 15:30  Afternoon Parallel Sessions

1. Session on Containers on Alps, Alberto Madonna, Dr. Theo Manitaras, Dr. Nicholas Browning, CSCS

• ML and PyTorch in containers
• Advances in containers for HPC
• Creating container images
• Run at scale with mpi and gpu support at CSCS

     2. Running and Developing on Grace Hopper, Dr. Sebastian Keller, Dr. Fabian Bösch, Dr. Jean Favre, CSCS

• Hardware overview
  • module 
  • node
• Benchmark results & performance expectations
• Optimizing performance
  • SLURM efficiently with GH200 (4 GPUs per node, thread affinity, etc)
  • Tensor cores / reduced precision
• Collective on GH200 with NCCL
• Visualization

15:30 - 16:00 Plenary Session: "STORAGE: A story about the lifecycle of a projects" Dr. Fawzi Roberto Mohamed, Dr. Matthias Kraushaar, CSCS

16:00 - 16:30 Q&A User Community to CSCS

16:30 Final Remarks & Farewell Coffee Apero

Registration

Registration is mandatory but without charge.

Deadline for registration: Sunday, August 17, 2025

Inquiries

Please contact Maria Grazia Giuffreda (mgg@cscs.ch) for questions related to the event content and info@cscs.ch for inquiries related to the event logistics.

We look forward to seeing you on Friday, August 29, 2025!