ICTP has recently signed an agreement with CERN to provide computer training in support of a major CERN donation of High-Performance Computing (HPC) equipment to the University of Benin (UNIBEN), Nigeria.

This is the first training activity planned for 2026 and it aims to provide a sustainable and practical training focused on:

    - Management of Data centers, cooling systems, Backup power
    - Installment and deployment of the HPC facility
    - Monitoring HPC system & Data center

The first two weeks will host a course by by Dr. Moreno Barecevic and Prof. Clement Onime, with theoretical lectures and lab activities on HPC facility deployment and management.
During this course participants will build and configure their own small HPC cluster from scratch, starting with hardware and network configuration and progressing to automated node provisioning, software management, configuration automation, workload scheduling, parallel computing, and cluster monitoring.

The course is delivered in a dedicated hands-on laboratory with nine laboratory stations, each providing a complete small-scale HPC cluster for an individual student.
Through intensive laboratory sessions, students work directly with technologies such as PXE, Cobbler, Ansible, Slurm, OpenMPI, InfiniBand, and Ganglia, gaining practical skills in HPC system administration, infrastructure management, storage management, and cloud computing.

The focus is on learning by doing: by the end of the course, students have built and operated a complete HPC environment and gained a practical understanding of how modern HPC clusters are deployed and managed.

The second part of the activity, coordinated by Prof. Clement Onime, will be dedicated to the configuration, deployment and testing of the HPC material sent by CERN to ICTP. This equipment is similar to the HPC hardware donated by CERN to UNIBEN.

Speakers:
Prof. Clement Onime (ICTP)
Dr. Moreno Baricevic (CNR, IOM)