UKZN postgraduate students exposed to HPC

Kevin Colville, a research scientist at the CHPC, has played an important role in exposing postgraduate students from the University of KwaZulu-Natal to high performance computing (HPC). He contributed a section titled 'Contemporary topics in computer science' to a course held at the Westville campus. His section focused on an introduction to numerical methods, numerical linear algebra, MPI programming in python, and HPC simulations.

The course targeted students in the Honours programme of the computer science department; they were joined by Master's students from the departments of applied mathematics and physics.

The intention of the course was to expose students to parallel programming and high performance computing. In order to ensure that learning moved beyond theory into practice, the students' final assignment was to parallelise a partial differential equation (PDE) solver for an electrostatic field problem.