Hungarian university among the elaboration of the first European MSc training program

The EuroHPC Joint Undertaking hired the consortium led by the University of Luxembourg to design and implement the first pan-European HPC master’s course pilot program. The winning consortium (of which the University of Pannonia is also a member) will launch its courses in August 2022, and this will offer outstanding career opportunities for students in the fields of high-performance computing (HPC) and high-performance data analysis (HPDA) or artificial intelligence (AI), which show increasing popularity.
The consortium comprising European universities, research institutes, supercomputer centres, and industrial partners will have an initial budget of EUR 7 million to develop a higher education program with the following objectives:

• to provide students with high-level knowledge in designing, developing, and operating existing and/or future-generation HPC systems and applications, and in the associated HPC technologies, and
• to train experts who could act as engines driving the adaptation of the HPC technology and the related knowledge transfer, and can couple industrial and research activities.

System administrators, system engineers, data scientists, and developers having HPC skills are all key players in implementing the digital transformation of Europe, which creates a great demand for highly skilled and talented graduate students.

Although many university curricula include basic IT and programming courses, training materials should be adapted to the fast-changing supercomputer systems. The curriculum of the pilot HPC master’s course is planned to have a modular structure in order to ensure complete or partial integrability of the training stages into the curricula of ongoing master’s courses.

The core objective of this initiative is to promote mobility between European universities, research laboratories, and industrial institutions. The new, HPC-focused master’s course will reach both scientific and industrial target groups and will support the key players of both the private and public domains.

The University of Pannonia is involved in the development of the curriculum and the training materials of the new HPC master’s course, and also participates in the student and lecturer mobility programs. We are committed to elaborating a high-quality master’s course and to reinforcing our international relations so that we can bring the highest level of HPC knowledge to our students.

Background

The members of the consortium led by the University of Luxembourg include universities, research/supercomputer centres, industrial partners, businesses, and other sponsoring partners.

Initially, eight universities will issue HPC master’s degrees (University of Luxembourg, Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya, Politecnico di Milano, Friedrich-Alexander-Universität Erlangen- Nürnberg, Sorbonne Université, Sofia University St. Kliment Ohridski, Università della Svizzera Italiana, Kungliga Tekniska Hoegskolan), but the list can be extended in the future.

We submitted our application for EuroHPC-2020-03 Call “Training and Education on HPC”, which was published in March 2021. This was the last call under the Multiannual Financial Framework for 2014-2020.

The consortium will develop and implement one or more pilot EU MSc programs in the field of HPC. The project is part of the strategy of the EuroHPC Joint Undertaking, which has the mission of building HPC-related skills and of promoting education/training to support the European industry and science.

A few words about the EuroHPC JU

The EuroHPC JU was established by Council Regulation (EU) 2018/1488 in 2018. 29 countries participate in the initiative, which has the mission of combining their national compute resources to ensure that the EU becomes a world leader in supercomputing.

The mission of the EuroHPC JU is to establish, operate, and improve a world-class European supercomputer and data processing infrastructure, and to support a competitive and innovative HPC ecosystem.

Further information is available at the website of the EuroHPC JU.