NA3 Progress update

1) Bodies and Groups established

a) The Coordination Panel
A cooordination panel comprising representatives from each of the
participating centres holds regular monthly meetings throughout the year,
mainly by tele conference but also in-person at project management
meetings. Additional communication among the group is facilitated by the
use of the NA3 email list.

b) The Experts Group
The HPC Experts group, which also comproses representatives from each of
the centres, e.g. reviews online material, the HCPE2 Virtual Life Cluster
DVD, suggests topics ans speakers for virgual surgeries and the TAM
pre-workshop conference.

2) The Wiki

Minutes of these meetings, together with reports, documents, self-study
material and a timetable, abstracts and slides for the virtual surgeries
can be found in the NA3 Wiki area (for how to get access to the wiki, see
http://www.hpc-europa.org).

3) Tools for Remote Communication & Collaboration

We supply intuitive and user-friendly interfaces, that facilitate remote
collaboration within the HPC-Europa visitor community for dissemination
activities, like surgeries, hotlines, etc. For a long time we have been
using AccessGrid. Due to its lack of collaboration capabilities, such as
chat rooms, screen and file sharing, or moderation fetaures, NA3 decided,
after an in-depth investigation, to switch to EVO (http://evo.caltech.edu)
which has been used successfully by NA3 since the begining of 2011.

4) We provide for the HPCE2 visitors

a) Visitor Wiki with self-study material
b) Regular remote surgeries
c) Workshops
a) A variety of online resources for visitors are available on the Wiki.
This material includes notes, slides, exercises and example solutions in
MPI or OpenMP and Fortran or C in fundamental topics related to HPC:>

- HPC Architectures
- Measuring Performance
- Message Passing Programming
- Shared Memory Programming

b) The remote virtual surgeries run on more specific topics as well as on
basic subjects such as OpenMP and MPI repeatedly throughout the year,
presented in different ways by different centres. There were nine virtual
surgeries held in 2010, five from Jan to Aug 2011 plus a hotline was
introduced, where attendees have the opportunity to discuss topics with a
group of experts. We attract up to over 40 attendees for the surgeries.

c) All material from the workshops run in 2010 and 2011 can be found at
http://csc.fi/english/csc/courses/archive/material/summerschool/material...,
http://csc.fi/english/csc/courses/archive/hpce2-tam-tutorial and
http://wiki.hpc-europa.eu/twiki/bin/view/HPCEuropa/Slides.