A two-day digital boot camp hosted by the University of Delaware helped 87 participating scientists ramp up their data analysis skills. The July event, held in partnership with GPUhackathon.org, was designed to help researchers improve coding skills and learn to use large-scale, high-performance computing systems.

Fifty members of the UD community — faculty, postdoctoral researchers, graduate and undergraduate students — attended, along with scientists from other parts of the globe, including India, Ecuador, Spain, Italy and Belgium. The event offered training in OpenACC, a programming model used to migrate scientific code from traditional Central Processing Units (CPUs) to Graphics Processing Units (GPUs). OpenACC also serves as portable code that runs across both kinds of processors.

Thirty people participated in a coding challenge on Day 2. Prizewinners were:

• First place: Debaditya Bhattachary, Indian Institute of Technology, Kanpur, India. Ayush Chaturvedi, Virginia Tech. Adviser: Prof. Robert Settlage, Virginia Tech.
• Second place: Eugene Li, University of Florida. John Pfreundschuh, UD, Mechanical Engineering. Advisor: Prof. Valéry Roy, UD. Rohit Venkata Sai Dulams, UD, Computer and Information Sciences. Adviser: Chandra Khambamettu, UD. Melissa Gatti, UD, Computer and Information Sciences. Advisor: Prof. Debra Yarrington, UD.
• Third place: Shea Fitzgerald, UD, Physics and Astronomy. Liam Sharp, UD, Physics and Astronomy. Adviser: Prof. Ed Lyman, UD.

Organizers included Prof. Sunita Chandrasekaran, UD, Computer and Information Sciences; Anita Schwartz, Michael Kyle and Jeff Frey, UD Information Technologies; and Julia Levites, Iris Chen, Izumi Barker, Mozhgan Kabiri Chimeh, Manjot Singh and Muntaser Syed, NVIDIA. Robert Searles of NVIDIA was the presenter.

For further information, please visit: https://www.openacc.org/success-stories