At the 54th International Conference on Parallel Processing (ICPP) in San Diego, HPSF hosted a four-day tutorial designed to give developers practical experience with some of today’s most important HPC tools.
Day 1: Spack
The tutorial kicked off with Spack, the package manager that simplifies the messy world of HPC software installation. As HPC tools and libraries become more complex, dependencies can turn into a real headache. Hands-on sessions showed participants how Spack helps build performant, GPU-optimized software stacks that work across platforms.
Days 2–3: Kokkos
The next two days focused on Kokkos, a C++ abstraction layer for performance portability. Using AWS with NVIDIA GPUs, participants learned how to write single-source applications that run on both CPUs and GPUs. The sessions covered everything from data parallelism constructs and hierarchical parallelism to advanced features like the Kokkos Profiling API. Attendees also got one-on-one time with Kokkos developers to discuss their own code migration challenges.
Day 4: Trilinos
The final day introduced Trilinos, a collection of numerical solvers for large-scale scientific and engineering problems. Since Trilinos is built on top of Kokkos, participants saw how these tools work together in real-world scenarios.
By the end of the week, participants walked away with practical skills in Spack, Kokkos, and Trilinos, better prepared to develop and optimize high-performance applications on modern supercomputing architectures.
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