I would like to welcome you to the Summer Supercomputing Academy at Moscow State University. This is an exciting time for computing as we begin the journey on the road to exa-scale computing. ‘Going to the exascale’ will mean radical changes in computing archi­tecture, software, and algorithms – basically, vastly increasing the levels of parallelism to the point of billions of threads working in tandem – which will force radical changes in how hardware is designed and how we go about solving problems. There are many com­putational and technical challenges ahead that must be overcome. The challenges are great, different than the current set of challenges, and exciting research problems await us. This is truly a time of great excitement in the design of software and algorithms for the next generation, perhaps a once in a life time oppor­tunity, and we will be part of that continuing evolution of the high performance computing ecology.

The Academy educational program covers a wide area of HPC topics, which will put you on the right track for dealing with the exciting challenges we all face with future computing systems.

I wish you well in your studies,