The PRACE Winter School on Petascale computing was held in Athens, Greece, from 10th to 13th February, and offered European users of High Performance Computing (HPC) a deep insight into current and future parallel programming techniques. Forty-eight participants from 18 European countries were selected from among 79 registrants to participate in this event, which was hosted by the Greek Research & Technology Network (GRNET), with the co-operation of the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki.

Leading experts on both current and future HPC programming trends were invited from Europe and the USA to lecture the Winter School students on topics including MPI/OpenMP hybrid programming, multi-core optimizations, Partitioned Global Address Space (PGAS) programming with Unified Parallel C (UPC), next-generation HPC programming with 'Chapel', and programming the novel IBM CELL system.

To enable students to also obtain practical experience with these techniques, access was provided during hands-on sessions to two PRACE prototype systems: The POWER6 system at the SARA Computing and Networking Services in Amsterdam, The Netherlands, and the IBM CELL system at the Barcelona Supercomputing Center (BSC) in Spain.

The PRACE Winter School was organized as part of the on-going PRACE education and training programme, which aims at preparing and initiating a world-class European HPC education and training ecosystem.