CERN openlab has been teaming up with Intel to organize regular training for CERN’s programmers. Even though four regular workshops relating to two major computing topics were established more than 2 years ago, it is not unusual for the sessions to be oversubscribed. Thanks for openlab’s collaboration with Intel and Hewlett-Packard, each of the participants at the mentioned workshops has the comfort of working on a dedicated 8-core machine with a suite of tools, including Intel Software tools such as compilers and multi-threading optimizers.

One of the two workshop series, held twice a year for two days, aims to prepare attendees for the multi-core future, and relates to multi-threading technologies and parallelism. The other series, also held twice per year for two days, teaches programmers how to write efficient code for today’s computing cores based on the Intel Architecture. CERN openlab lecturers Sverre Jarp and Andrzej Nowak, assisted by Jeff Arnold from Intel as well as a guest speaker, have recently led a session of this type for 35 participants. The topics covered ranged from computer architecture, through benchmarking, optimization and compilers to high level issues seen in specific programming languages.

In addition, Intel and openlab organized a separate two day workshop for CERN’s key developers in mid-September. This special event was focused on getting the best performance out of applications and hardware by using tools such as the Intel Performance Tuning Utility. Another event of this type is foreseen for 2010. It will be targeting an expert audience as well.