The availability of high-speed networks and increasingly powerful commodity microprocessors are making the usage of clusters, or networks, of computers an appealing vehicle for cost effective parallel computing. Clusters, built using commodity-of-the-shelf COTS) hardware components as well as free, or commonly used, software, are playing a major role in redefining the concept of high performance computing.\nThe School aims to provide the skills needed to benefit from this generation of HPC solutions, giving a basic knowledge of programming, administering and tuning, as well purchasing or building Linux-based clusters.\n\nAs a provisional program there will be lectures on : Interconnections solutions(characteristics and performances) Parallel programming techniques Optimization and profiling techniques for clusters Operating system issues: parallel file systems and IO\n System Administration of a Linux cluster These lectures will be complemented by hands-on lab sessions where participants, grouped in small teams, will build their own cluster from scratch; during the first week of the school these clusters will be assembled, configured and tested. In the second part of the course, some representative parallel codes in the areas of computational condensed matter, engineering and weather forecast will be distributed to the participants. These codes will be presented in a series of tutorials illustrating their usage and the parallelisation strategies they adopt. During Lab sessions, the participiants will be asked to install, analyse and profile some of these codes on the previously built clusters