The first two days will focus on porting an application to a massively parallel computer. For this the students will have access to the largest machine in Europe, the Blue Gene/P system in Jülich. The students will also have access to Cray XT4 at CSC, the Finnish IT center for science. Students are encouraged to bring their own applications to the Summer School. The last two days will focus on advanced parallel programming and are concurrent with the final two days of the two week "Introduction to High-Performance Computing" Summer School. Topics covered include hybrid programming (MPI and OpenMP) and performance measurement tools and techniques.

The PRACE Petascale Summer School targets students from research groups that have the ambition of becoming users of future Petascale systems in Europe. The prerequisites are familiarity with parallel programming and usage of parallel computers.

The Summer School is part of the PRACE project's education and training task and its aim is to implement a European High Performance Computing (HPC) education and training programme for scalable scientific computing. The Summer School will be followed by a Winter School in Greece in February 2009.