The Train the Trainer course was organized from 30 January to 5 February as a series of full-day, intensive lectures, delivered alongside the standard AI and multi-GPU computing courses. This workshop complemented the strong technical focus of the regular course with a dedicated educational track. While the regular course concentrated on hands-on skills for building, scaling, and optimizing AI workloads across multiple GPUs, the Train-the-Trainer track was specifically designed to equip future instructors with the knowledge and pedagogical tools needed to teach these topics effectively. With only a few HPC and AI centres across Europe offering such specialized education, this programme helps expand the network of trainers and institutions capable of delivering high-quality AI and multi-GPU courses at both national and European levels. Researchers from the National Competence Center (NCC) Montenegro participated in this course, further strengthening national capacities in advanced AI and multi-GPU training.
During the training event, participants developed a deep understanding of modern multi-GPU and distributed AI technologies, while also learning effective strategies for teaching these complex concepts. Guided by expert instructors, attendees explored state-of-the-art tools, frameworks, and best practices for scaling AI workloads, combined with pedagogical approaches, teaching materials, and hands-on experience tailored to support the delivery of their own courses. The lectures covered a broad spectrum of topics, including GPU architectures and access to HPC infrastructure; fundamentals of deep learning and the transition from CPU- to GPU-based workloads; distributed training with PyTorch (Distributed Data Parallel, model parallelism, PyTorch Lightning); large language models, fine-tuning techniques, and frameworks such as Hugging Face Accelerate and DeepSpeed; as well as computer vision, MLOps, Ray, Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG), and hyperparameter tuning.
The training event was organised by NCC Poland, NCC Netherlands, NCC Hungary, NCC Belgium, NCC Italy, NCC Finland, NCC Sweden, all National Competence Centres for High-Performance Computing, CASTIEL2 and EuroCC2/EuroCC4SEE.