From July 17 to 19, 2025, the eighth edition of the HPC Summer School was held, organized by Cybercolombia in collaboration with SCALAC. It was consolidated as a distributed learning experience across 10 universities in Colombia, with the active participation of 150 students connected from institutions such as Universidad Nacional de Colombia, Universidad EAFIT, Pontificia Universidad Javeriana, Universidad Distrital Francisco José de Caldas, Universidad de Los Andes, Universidad del Norte, Universidad de Cartagena, Universidad Pedagógica y Tecnológica de Colombia, Universidad Autónoma de Occidente, and Universidad del Valle.
Over the course of three intensive days, participants experienced a unique interdisciplinary and hands-on training program covering key topics such as data science, image processing, artificial intelligence, and data parallelism. This edition marked a milestone by incorporating a distributed approach, strengthening inter-institutional collaboration and expanding access to cutting-edge knowledge in high-performance computing.
The School included keynote sessions and practical workshops led by international experts. Mario Ruiz conducted a hands-on Neural Processing Unit (NPU) Programming for AI” and Thomas Papatheodore “ROCm and HIP Lab “, both from AMD University Program. Aurelio Vivas from Universidad de Los Andes delivered an intensive session on data parallelism using Dask.
One of the highlights of the event was the talk by Dr. Javier Aula-Blasco, who gave a presentation on understanding Large Language Models (LLMs), one of the most influential technologies in the current field of artificial intelligence.
Later, Alfonso Ladino-Rincón from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign gave the talk "Fast, FAIR, and Scalable: Managing Big Data in HPC with Zarr", which focused on how traditional scientific data formats must evolve toward specialized on-demand reading interfaces to enhance access to large-scale data.
The sessions also featured the participation of experts such as Siddhisanket Raskar (Argonne National Laboratory), who delivered a talk on the future of AI accelerators; and Carlos Álvarez (Tecnológico de Monterrey), who demonstrated how AI frameworks leverage parallel programming through real examples on a cluster.
For the past seven years, Cybercolombia in collaboration with SCALAC, has promoted the development of young talent in HPC, and this eighth edition reinforces its commitment to training a new generation of researchers and professionals equipped to face future technological challenges.
Thanks to all the speakers, host universities, and students for making this edition possible and encourages everyone to continue building learning networks that drive the digital future of Latin America.
