The thematic school – a smaller CERN School of Computing

The Thematic school (tCSC) is a smaller version of the main school. This week-long school is usually organised in spring (May or June), and welcomes 25-30 students. It was first organized in 2013, and since then has been attended by almost 200 international students.

Unlike the main school that includes a breadth of topics, the thematic school covers more in depth a selected theme. Since its inception, the tCSC focused on scientific software efficiency, and included (depend on the year) classes on computer architectures, vectorization, software design, parallelism and concurrency, efficient I/O, code optimisation and finally heterogenous programming – see the programme of the 2020 edition. Additional different themes are planned for future thematic schools.

The thematic school concludes with an optional exam. The social and sports activities are also an important part of this school.