Day 1 of the Spring School at Namal, organized by the Center for AI and Big Data, focused on introducing participants to the world of supercomputing and high-performance computing (HPC). The day began with a welcome note, followed by a session led by T. Hussain, discussing the role and importance of supercomputing centers in third-generation entrepreneurial institutes.

The subsequent session delved into understanding supercomputing and HPC architectures. T. Hussain covered various aspects of HPC systems, including hardware configurations, parallel programming models, libraries, network configurations, file systems, and supercomputing system software stacks.

In the following session, M. Usman discussed C programming for HPC applications, emphasizing memory addressing in parallel architectures, dynamic function dispatching in parallel programming, and tracing impactful projects like the Linux Kernel or OpenMPI.

The day concluded with a hands-on session on accessing a supercomputer, led by T. Hussain and the CAID team. Participants learned essential commands for working in a supercomputing environment, such as ssh, scp, Slurm commands, Linux command line development tools, and managing the Linux environment for developers.