[AC-SIG] Netherlands eScience Center Special Interest Group on Advanced Computing

The Advanced Computing (AC) Special Interest Group (formerly known as both the GPU and HPC SIG) at the Netherlands eScience Center is a community that meets approximately every month to discuss cutting-edge research, technological advancements, and best practices in high-performance computing.

Each meeting typically revolves around a single presentation focused on HPC-related research or its practical application within ongoing projects. We welcome participants to share applications or workflows that face compute-intensive challenges, as this allows the group to provide tailored advice for optimizing performance and addressing code-level issues. From time to time, we also invite external speakers, including academic researchers, industry experts, and students who have completed relevant master’s projects, to enrich our discussions with diverse perspectives.

If you are interested in presenting your work or would like to suggest an external speaker, please feel free to get involved by subscribing to any of the upcoming sessions. Contributions can be made via a pull request to the session calendar below, or by sending an email to one of the contact people.

Contact people:

• Alessio Sclocco (a.sclocco@esciencecenter.nl)
• Stijn Heldens (s.heldens@esciencecenter.nl)
• Leon Oostrum (l.oostrum@esciencecenter.nl)

2026 Calendar

Date	Presenter	Topic
2026-01-29	Hanno Spreeuw	Debugging 15-Year-Old Code with CUDA-GDB
2026-02-12	Leon Oostrum	Debugging MPI + GPU code on HPC systems
2026-03-05	Alexander Hadjiivanov	Tutorial on Neuromorphic Computing
2026-04-02	SIG	Project update session
2026-05-28	-	-
2026-06-25	-	-
2026-09-17	-	-
2026-11-12	-	-
2026-12-10	-	-

2025 Calendar

Date	Presenter	Topic
2025-01-30	SIG	Update and planning session
2025-02-13	Alessio Sclocco and Stijn Heldens	Update on KMM version 0.3
2025-03-13	Lourens Veen	Managing multiple processes in a single SLURM allocation
2025-03-27	Leon Oostrum	Vendor-agnostic host code with gpuwrappers
2025-04-10	Stefan Verhoeven	Containers for testing HPC and grid
2025-04-24	Tuna Kalayci (Leiden University)	Archēbot: An Attempt for a Swarm Robotic System for Archaeological Fieldwork
2025-05-08	Leon Oostrum	Directive-based programming on GPUs: OpenMP vs OpenACC
2025-05-22	SIG	Report on the CI/CD internal hackathon
2025-06-05	Floris-Jan Willemsen	Efficient Hyperparameter Tuning for Auto-tuning
2025-06-19	Leon Oostrum	The Tensor-Core Beamformer: A High-Speed Signal-Processing Library for Multidisciplinary Use
2025-07-03	Ozgun Erdogan (ubicloud)	Frontier AI models: A review of past nine months
2025-09-25	SIG	Updates and planning session
2025-10-09	Henk Dreuning (SURF)	LUMI: One of Europe's fastest supercomputers
2025-11-06	Alessio Sclocco, Robin Richardson, Stijn Heldens	HP2SIM: parallelizing a high-performance finite element toolbox in Julia
2025-11-20	Bart Schilperoort	Hydrology on GPU: leveraging Julia's generic GPU ecosystem
2025-11-20	SIG	Nomenclature of our Computing Technological Expertise
2025-12-18	Stijn Heldens	Introduction to Mixed-Precision GPU Programming

2024 Calendar

Date	Presenter	Topic
2024-01-25	Tim Besard (JuliaHub)	Introduction to GPU programming in Julia
2024-02-08	Hanno Spreeuw	Porting the Python Source Extractor (PySE) to GPU without writing a single kernel
2024-02-22	Richard Schoonhoven (CWI)	Going green: optimizing GPUs for energy efficiency through model-steered auto-tuning
2024-03-06	Stijn Heldens	Parallel programming systems for scalable scientific computing
2024-03-21	SIG	Highlights from GTC 2024
2024-04-04	Leon Oostrum	Making your CUDA life easier with cudawrappers
2024-05-02	SIG	Project update session
2024-05-16	Denis Kumar (Student VU)	Auto-tuning OpenMP GPU applications
2024-05-30	Alessio Sclocco	Auto-tuning OpenACC applications
2024-06-13	Alessio Sclocco and Stijn Heldens	KMM: a lightweight C++ middleware for accelerated computing
2024-06-27	Hanno Spreeuw	From cudawrappers to HIPwrappers
2024-07-11	SIG	Report on second ESiWACE3 hackathon
2024-08-15	Denis Kumar (Student VU)	Optimizing GPU Performance with OpenMP: An Advanced Auto-Tuning Framework Utilizing Kernel Tuner
2024-09-26	Stijn Heldens	Bringing Auto-Tuning to HIP: Analysis of Tuning Impact and Difficulty on AMD and Nvidia GPUs
2024-10-10	Hanno Spreeuw	Real-time processing of 4K * 4K images from the Square Kilometre Array on a single core of a high-end CPU
2024-10-24	Ariana Torres-Knoop (SURF)	Quantum computers in HPC centers
2024-11-07	SIG	Testing of GPU code
2024-11-21	SIG	Joint meeting with SURF
2024-12-05	Lucas Esclapez	OpenACC directives tuning with Kernel Tuner: application to DALES
2024-12-19	Ivy Wang (Student UvA/VU)	Multi-GPU Implementation in MRI Reconstruction

2023 Calendar

Date	Presenter	Topic
2023-02-16	Floris-Jan Willemsen	A Methodology for Comparing Auto-Tuning Optimization Algorithms
2023-03-02	SIG	Continuous Integration (CI) and Profiling
2023-03-16	Bouwe Andela	Scaling data-intensive computations with Dask in the ESMValTool KD project
2023-03-30	SIG	Profiling GPU applications
2023-04-13	Benjamin Czaja (SURF)	Performance and Energy analysis of Large scale applications on Snellius
2023-05-11	Jaro Camphuijsen	The environmental impact of High Perfomance Computing in Science
2023-05-25	Gijs van den Oord	Using OpenACC to accelerate Earth System Models: experiences from ESiWACE2
2023-06-08	Leon Oostrum	Accelerating medical and astronomical beamforming with the RECRUIT project
2023-06-22	SIG	Projects update session
2023-07-06	Milo Lurati (Student VU)	Comparing the Impact & Difficulty of Auto-Tuning on AMD and Nvidia GPUs
2023-09-21	Lucas Esclapez	Bringing reactive flow simulations to the ExaScale using Pele
2023-10-05	Ömer Şakar (UT Twente)	Alpinist: an Annotation-Aware GPU Program Optimizer
2023-10-19	Gijs van den Oord	GPU optimizations in the proton structure project
2023-11-02	SIG	ESiWACE3 Hackathon and MPI PotreeConverter
2023-11-30	Stijn Heldens	Kernel Float: Auto-tuning mixed precision GPU kernels

2022 Calendar

Date	Presenter	Topic
2022-01-20	Patrick Bos	SSI call kickoff discussion
2022-02-10	Ben van Werkhoven	Generic Autotuning Technology for GPU Applications
2022-03-03	Gijs van den Oord	Optimization of the RTE+RRTMGP-C++ library
2022-03-24	SIG	OpenSSI Optimization updates
2022-04-14	Jeff Larkin (NVIDIA)	Introduction to OpenACC
2022-06-16	Jeff Larkin (NVIDIA)	Standard language parallelism
2022-07-14	SIG	OpenSSI Optimization updates
2022-09-08	Merijn Verstraaten	Analysis and Prediction of GPU Graph Algorithm Performance (PhD defence @ UvA)
2022-09-29	Tom Deakin (University of Bristol)	Introduction to Heterogeneous Programming with SYCL
2022-10-20	SIG	OpenSSI Optimization updates
2022-11-10	Lars van den Haak (TU Eindhoven)	Verifying and Optimizing GPU software using the Domain Specific Language Halide
2022-12-01	Stijn Heldens	Kernel Launcher: Integrating Kernel-Tuner into C++

2021 Calendar

Date	Presenter	Topic
2021-02-25	Gijs van den Oord	Performance portability: are DSL's the answer?
2021-03-18	Hanno Spreeuw	Parallellisation of kappa, sigma clipping of subimages from large astronomical maps: Ray vs. Dask
2021-04-08	Sven-Bodo Scholz (RU)	High-Performance Computing for everyone
2021-04-29	Ben van Werkhoven and Floris Jan Willemsen	Auto-tuning research update
2021-06-10	Alessio Sclocco	GPU Computing carpentry lesson
2021-07-01	Jens Wehner	Brainstorming session: linking eScience engineers and applied mathematicians
2021-07-22	Floris-Jan Willemsen	Bayesian Optimization for Auto-Tuning GPU kernels
2021-09-02	Alessio & Ben	Preparations for Kernel Tuner tutorial
2021-09-23	Niels Drost	SSI Optimize call
2021-10-14	Jens Wehner	GPU parallelisation and scheduling in a quantum chemistry software, a simple attempt
2021-11-04	SIG	Projects update session
2021-11-25	Gijs van den Oord	Using OpenACC to accelerate an ocean model

2020 Calendar

Date	Presenter	Topic
2020-01-23	Merijn Verstraaten	Futhark: a Functional Array Language
2020-02-13	Felipe Zapata	An Eigen-Cuda interface for Tensor-matrix multiplications
2020-03-05	Ben van Werkhoven	New features in CUDA
2020-03-26	Alessio Sclocco	GPU workshops/hackatons/trainings
2020-05-07	Ben van Werkhoven	Auto-tuning research update
2020-05-28	Alessio Sclocco	News roundup
2020-06-18	Victor Azizi and Gijs van den Oord	Medina, atmospheric chemistry on the GPU
2020-07-09	Sagar Dolas (SURF)	The future of Supercomputing
2020-09-10	Dennis Klein (Student VU)	Survey of optimization methods for auto-tuning energy efficiency
2020-10-01	SIG	Project updates session
2020-10-22	Hanno Spreeuw	Parallellisation of kappa, sigma clipping of radio astronomical images by distributing rows of subimages over multiple CPU cores using Ray
2020-11-12	Alessio Sclocco	Porting the FESOM 2.0 model to GPUs
2020-12-03	Federico Fadda (UvA)	GPU simulation of active Brownian particle interactions via the Lennard-Jones force

2019 Calendar

Date	Presenter	Topic
2019-01-28	Souley Madougou	Introduction and overview of earlier GPU-related research
2019-02-25	Daan Siepelinga (Student VU)	A performance analysis of auto-tuned matrix multiplication GPU kernels
2019-03-21	Ehsan Sharifi (Student VU)	A survey on solutions for improving energy-efficiency in GPUs
2019-04-25	Hanno Spreeuw	Running your GPU based applications from Singularity containers
2019-05-16	Johan Hidding	Inline FFTs and code generators
2019-06-27	Stephen Swatman (Student UvA)	Performance Engineering in the ATLAS Particle Physics Experiment
2019-07-18	Thom Visser (Student UvA)	Building Predictive Models for Optimal GPU Kernel Configurations
2019-08-29	Ehsan Sharifi (Student VU)	Auto-tuning GPU Kernels for Energy Efficiency
2019-09-19	Hanno Spreeuw	Self-calibration using SAGECal on an NVIDIA Jetson Nano
2019-10-10	Ben van Werkhoven	best practices when benchmarking cuda applications
2019-10-31	Hanno Spreeuw	Conclusions from running SAGECal on the Nano and Intel Xeon E5-2660v3
2019-11-14	Ben van Werkhoven	Lessons learned in a decade of research software engineering GPU applications
2019-12-12	Stijn Heldens	Highlights from Supercomputing 2019