ESC Efficient Scientific Computing School

Architectures, tools and methodologies for developing efficient large scale scientific computing applications.

ESC 2025
will take place from
29th September to 9th October 2025.

Info: esc_contact@lists.infn.it

Welcome to ESC School

ESC School takes place every year in October, in Bertinoro, Italy.

The ESC School offers the participants the opportunity to improve their computing competences, learning from qualified and experienced scientists how to best exploit modern hardware and software technologies in their daily scientific work.

The programme includes introductory lectures on current trends in the evolution of processor architectures and parallel programming. This will be followed by more in-depth lectures on advanced programming with C++, efficient use of memory, floating-point computation and programming in a heterogeneous environment, exploiting the potential of multi-threaded computing, GPUs and cluster computing with MPI.

The school, primarily aimed at PhD students and young researchers who are actively involved in the development of scientific applications and software tools for research, is organized as a small class of about 25 students, alternating lectures, hands-on sessions and self-managed time slots for the best learning experience, with lecturers available during the whole period for insights and discussions.

ESC school is knows also as Scuola di Bertinoro in Efficient Scientific Computing.

The school has already welcomed hundreds of students, always with a very high appreciation.

ESC Teachers

ESC teachers are worldwide experts that work at INFN, CERN and in the most prestigius universities.

F. Giacomini - INFN, CNAF

Tim Mattson - Independent Researcher

Video

Redjeb Wahid - CERN

A. Bocci - CERN

F. Pantaleo - CERN

D. Cesini - INFN, CNAF

Feedback from our former students

High quality materials and proficiency of the lecturers in their field, which resulted in useful hands-on sections because of their insights. Moreover, I liked the interactions opportunities during breaks and meals to speak with the lecturers.

(ESC23 participant)

The topics were really interesting and most of them were new to me, so this school were a crash-course which gave me a lot of stimulating hints
to deepen further when I get home.

(ESC23 participant)

“The amount of detail provided on each topic is incredible, and tutors and teachers are always available for questions and curiosities on every aspect. There was plenty of time to have a look at the exercises and the ratio of #students/#tutor was perfect.”
(ESC22 participant)

“The organization of classes is on very high level, I think it is brushed into near perfection. The topics were presented in very clear way with a lot of consideration for people that were not familiar with some basic concepts.”
(ESC22 participant)

“I really enjoyed the possibility to interact directly with the experts, ask questions, get information during a chat in the coffee break, as well as the well organized consolidation sessions. It was great also the panoramic view of the different options about optimization and parallelization, from simple vectorization, to more complex offloading of processes.”
(ESC21 participant)

“I really enjoyed the variety of the lessons arguments. In my future projects I definitely will employ some of the techniques shown during this school. The hands on lessons were also very useful to fix the notions right away.”
(ESC21 participant)

“The location of the school was exceptional: Bertinoro is simply incredible!
I think the School contents were really useful. The professors seemed very competent and capable to teach such an amount of notions in few days, which is not always the case.”
(ESC21 participant)

“Lectures had a didactic approach: they were lessons, not only presentations. Tutors were clear and always available for further explanations.”
(ESC19 participant)

“Learning by doing is the only approach that really works and it is the motto of this school.”
(ESC19 participant)

“The scientific and social environment has been great, large support from both students and teachers. Large variety of topics, satisfying interests and everybody’s curiosity. The school totally matched my expectations of enlarging my knowledge and gain some experience in other computing topics.”
(ESC18 participant)

“The school introduced the latest C++17 standard. Consolidation time slots were a nice introduction to the school.
Three parallel computing approaches threading, CUDA (GPU) and MPI were introduced at the same time which is a very good approach.
Instructors were friendly and helped as much as they could.”
(ESC18 participant)

IDC Special Studies for the European Commission #SR03S

“… sustained performance leadership on real-world high performance computing applications and workloads
will be determined far more by software advances than by hardware progress…”