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

The MSc runs yearly, starting in September. The taught part comprises a series of modules, with associated tutorials, course work and examinations. Students also submit a dissertation based on 16-weeks’ independent research work. 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 computing solutions to real-life problems. This postgraduate qualification, awarded by the University of Edinburgh, has a strong practical focus. It covers topics relevant to a wide spectrum of careers including computational science research and commercial software development.

MSc students will have access to an impressive range of leading-edge parallel platforms and HPC technologies. Graduates of this course will hold one of the few university-accredited postgraduate HPC qualifications in Europe.

The University of Edinburgh holds a £53M six-year contract from the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) to provide the flagship UK national parallel supercomputer facility. The HPCx service is run by a consortium comprising EPCC, Daresbury Laboratory and IBM UK, and allows researchers to address some of the most challenging problems in science.

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

Students on the MSc will learn all the fundamental techniques required to program machines of this size, and how to develop parallel programs that scale to many hundreds and even thousands of processors. EPSRC is keen for students to have access to the HPCx facility, and we expect that many of our MSc 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 currently working in a relevant field. The entrance requirement is a good honours degree or equivalent work experience. No prior HPC knowledge is assumed, but candidates must be competent programmers in Java, C, C++ or Fortran.

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

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