EPCC, a technology transfer centre within the University of Edinburgh,offers a one-year Masters course in High Performance Computing (HPC). Anumber of EPSRC studentships are available, which cover the full fees for EUresidents. UK residents also qualify for a maintenance grant.

The MSc runs yearly, starting in September. The taught part comprises aseries of modules, with associated tutorials, course work and examinations.Students also submit a dissertation based on 16-weeks’ independent researchwork. It is possible to study part-time.

Taught courses include:

• Fundamental Concepts of HPC
• Practical Software Development
• Shared Memory Programming
• Message Passing Programming
• Parallel Decomposition
• Advanced Topics in HPC and e-Science
• Applied Numerical Algorithms
• Hardware, Compilers and Performance Optimisation
• Object Oriented Programming for HPC
• Scientific Visualisation
• Performance scaling on Modern HPC Architectures
• HPC Techniques in Computational Chemistry
• HPC Techniques in Computational Engineering
• HPC Project Preparation

EPCC has an international reputation in the application of novel computingsolutions to real-life problems. This postgraduate qualification, awarded bythe University of Edinburgh, has a strong practical focus. It covers topicsrelevant to a wide spectrum of careers including computational scienceresearch and commercial software development.

MSc students will have access to an impressive range of leading-edgeparallel platforms and HPC technologies. Graduates of this course will holdone of the few university-accredited postgraduate HPC qualifications inEurope.

The University of Edinburgh holds a £53M six-year contract from theEngineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) to provide theflagship UK national parallel supercomputer facility. The HPCx service isrun by a consortium comprising EPCC, Daresbury Laboratory and IBM UK, andallows researchers to address some of the most challenging problems inscience.

The HPCx system is one of the most powerful supercomputers in Europe,comprising 1600 IBM Power4+ processors and sustaining 6.2 Tflops on theLinpack benchmark. EPCC also hosts a wide range of other supercomputersincluding QCDOC, a novel multi-Tflop architecture for particle physicssimulations with 14000 CPUs, and the first IBM Blue Gene system in Europewhich was installed in December 2004 and contains 2048 processors.

Students on the MSc will learn all the fundamental techniques required toprogram machines of this size, and how to develop parallel programs thatscale to many hundreds and even thousands of processors. EPSRC is keen forstudents to have access to the HPCx facility, and we expect that many of ourMSc students will use HPCx for their dissertation work.

Applications are encouraged from graduates of all areas of science,engineering, computer science and mathematics, and from those currentlyworking in a relevant field. The entrance requirement is a good honoursdegree or equivalent work experience. No prior HPC knowledge is assumed, butcandidates must be competent programmers in Java, C, C++ or Fortran.

For entry in September 2007, the closing date for receipt of applicationsis:28 February 2007 for UK/EU nationals and 31 January 2007 for studentswho do not have UK or EU nationality.

For more information and application details seehttp://www.epcc.ed.ac.uk/msc/ or email msc@epcc.ed.ac.uk