BEAST Lab: A Practical Course on Experimental Evaluation of Diverse Modern HPC Architectures and Accelerators

Giving students a good understanding how micro-architectural effects impact achievable performance of HPC workloads is essential for their education. It enables them to find effective optimization strategies and to reason about sensible approaches towards better efficiency. This paper describes a lab course held in collaboration between LRZ, LMU, and TUM. The course was born with a dual motivation in mind: filling a gap in educating students to become HPC experts, as well as understanding the stability and usability of emerging HPC programming models for recent CPU and GPU architectures with the help of students. We describe the course structure used to achieve these goals, resources made available to attract students, and experiences and statistics from running the course for six semesters. We conclude with an assessment of how successfully the lab course met the initially set vision.