Stefano Cozzini is presently the director of the Technological Innovation Research Institute (RIT) at Area Science Park where he is managing all the scientific infrastructures of the campus, including a Next Sequencing Generation platform and the ORFEO HPC/AI data center. He teaches HPC topics at Data Science and Scientific Computing master’s degree of University of Trieste and at Master in High Performance Computing of SISSA and he is currently involved in several National and European projects on the above topic.
His present scientific interest is in the area between HPC and AI and on FAIR data management. He is also founder and shareholder of eXact lab, a data driven company.
Title: “a 20 years journey in HPC training and education: from flops to data”
Abstract:
This talk traces two decades of HPC training and education, from grassroots regional schools to structured academic master’s programs, mirroring the field’s own shift from raw computational power to data-centric science.
The journey starts in Trieste itself, with the seminal Joint ICTP-INFM School on High Performance Computing on Linux Clusters, held at ICTP in 2002. That same model was soon exported to Latin America, with the first Regional School on HPC on Linux Clusters at the Universidad de Los Andes in Mérida, Venezuela, in 2003, followed by several other editions across Latin America, seeding a generation of HPC practitioners who later went on to promote their own training activities.
A decade later, this training approach was distilled into one of the first dedicated academic master’s programs: the Master in High Performance Computing (MHPC), a joint SISSA-ICTP program that institutionalized training in parallel programming and scalable algorithms. A decade after that, we set up the Master in Data Management and Curation (MDMC), launched with Area Science Park to equip researchers with FAIR data stewardship and data infrastructure skills.
The arc from those first Linux-cluster schools to today’s FAIR data curation programs echoes a broader transformation of the field. Drawing on hands-on experience across continents and formats, the talk reflects on what has changed, what has stayed constant, and what lessons this journey holds for the next generation of HPC and data education.