Great Interest in the Parallel Programming Course

The Parallel Programming course has begun at the University of Donja Gorica, with more than 50 registered participants, organized as part of EuroCC project activities focused on the development of HPC and parallel programming skills and competencies.

Ms Sanja NIkolic presenting the NCC Montenegro activities

In front of National Competence Center for High Performance Computing (HPC NCC), mr Sanja Nikolić introduced the course participants to supercomputer systems and applications, especially from the aspect of their commercial application and digital transformation of business models towards innovative processes and products to improve industrial competitiveness. She also presented the EuroHPC Joint Undertakingthe , whith budget of € 7 bn for the improvement of the HPC ecosystem in Europe through the Digital Europe and Horizon Europe programs, and through projects such as EURO CC, which focus is on the development of National Competence Centers in the field of high-performance computing, as reference point for coordination of all national HPC activities and access to Eurpean supercomputing resources. The activities of NCC Montenegro were also presented, focusing on HPC/HPDA/AI research and development, competence mapping, education and trainings, as well as on examples of successful cooperation with representatives of industry, academia and public sector resulted in HPC-advanced business practices.

Dr Luka Filipović givin an introduction to the course

Assistant professor dr Luka Filipović instructed attendees in the technical aspects and configuration of the HPC systems, parallel and distributed computer systems and presented in detail the plan of the theoretical and practical part of the parallel programming course intended for high-performance computing. Within the course program, lasting  6 weeks, the concepts of parallel computers, their purpose, architecture, division, guidelines for the development of parallel programs, as well as the analysis of the performance of parallel programs will be duly explained. In the practical part, the development of parallel programs based on the architecture of shared and distributed memory and based on the hybrid model will be demonstrated by respective examples. The lectures will be held in cooperation with colleagues from the HPC National Competence Center of Germany.

Course offered in context of EuroCC project

The Parallel Programming course is attended by representatives of the industrial sector and interested students of regular, master and doctoral studies of all universities, who will receive a corresponding certificate upon successful completion. Students of the Master’s program Artificial Intelligence from the Faculty of Information Systems, UDG will present their seminar papers at the end of the course.

Around 50 trainees from academia and industry enrolled

Second generation enrolled in the Master AI program at UDG

As the first year of the new Master program in Artificial Intelligence at the Faculty for Information Systems and Technologies, University of Donja Gorica, is behind us a second generation has been enrolled. They will be attending courses on Mathematics, Data science, Digital transformation, Advanced programming, History of ideas, Research methodology.

Our first generation students worked hard both in theoretical and practical aspects of the curriculum. Some of the students took part in research projects and some have already presented their first papers at scientific-technical conferences. This year the will be attending Deep Learning and Parallel Computing courses that will be implemented with the support of NCC Montenegro and partners from EuroCC.

Second year of implementing the Master program in AI on UDG

Prof. Armin Alibasi​c on Castiel workshop on Human engagement

Within the Next Castiel training, a member of NCC Montenegro, Ass. professor Armin Alibasic will take part with the topic, “How to engage younger students, including high schools, on HPC”. Through the training, Armin will bring to the attention of all the methods and techniques used by NCC Montenegro, to bring a topic that was almost unknown to the general public, especially to young people, and develop certain knowledge and skills in them.

Prof. Alibasic will be talking at the upcoming Castiel workshop

Parallel Computing Course

University of Donja Gorica and NCC Montenegro are organizing parallel computing course. Parallel computing is essential for solving numerical problems that are too hard for sequential programs. During this course, distributed and parallel computing will be introduced to the students and industry partners, as well as performance indicators of parallel programs. In the second part of training, students will be familiarized to the fundamentals of parallel programming with multicore HPCs using shared memory and distributed memory architecture with OpenMP and MPI. After adoption of parallel programming essentials, lectures will cover all steps of decomposition of serial program and their transformation into parallel; recognize parallelization and communication potential problems.

The expected duration of the course is 5 weeks, 90 minutes per week in the afternoon hours

Course start : 9.11.2022, 17.30,
Location : University of Donja Gorica, A3 amphitheatre (3rd floor).

Click on image to register

UDG accepting applications for PhD programs in Information Technology and Economics

University of Donja Gorica is accepting applications for PhD studies at the Faculty of International Economics, Finances and Business and at the Faculty for Information systems and technologies. NCC EuroCC will provide support to PhD students interested in the use of HPC, HPDA and AI in their research. More information available at: https://www.udg.edu.me/

Click on image for more info on PhD program in Information Technology

Open Mind Academy: Successful Python Course for High-school students

During the summer school of game programming, students had the opportunity to learn the basics of the Python programming language, and later the pyGame game development package within the EuroCC NCC Montenegro.

Python programming for high-school students

In the first part of the training, students learned why programming is so widespread today, what the basic data types are in Python, what are the conditions and loops. Also, students had the opportunity to learn what lists and dictionaries are, but also what object-oriented programming is. Besides listening to lectures, everyone who wanted to follow the second part of the training had to do homework (writing essays and programming). In the second part of the training, intensive lectures were held where the participants heard more about the Python package pyGame. This package is used to develop games in Python. Through the creation of the game, students learned how to program movement in games, detect collisions between objects, add graphics, sound. At the end of this part of the training, 4 teams were formed. The last day of training was organized as a competition between teams. Their task was to make a smaller game. The winning team won the prize to participate in this year’s conference within the EuroCC NCC Montenegro project.

Students spent time in online sessions to prepare and then three full days at the UDG

It was a pleasure for us to work with such a talented group of young people who we expect will achieve great success in the future.

Online sessions were attended by 25 students and 16 of them came for 3-day workshop at the UDG

BSc Thesis: The use of ML to assess plant health

Ms Almira Suljovic, a student of the Faculty of Applied Sciences, defended her BSc Thesis in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science. The topic of the thesis work was the use of machine learning to detect diseased plants by processing images of the leaves. The work included creation of a prediction model as well as the integration of the model into a mobile application for the use by farmers. She has done her thesis work under the supervision of prof. Tomo Popovic, PhD, and mr Stevan Cakic, MSc.

BSc Thesis – the use of ML to detect plant disease

ABSTRACT – Early detection and prevention are one of the biggest difficulties in the field of agriculture. Late detection of plant diseases or the use of wrong pesticides often leads to crop damage, reducing food quality. As the leaf is the best indicator of whether a plant is healthy or not, we can construct prediction models using machine learning to identify leaf status in the shortest possible time, thus preventing or reducing losses. This thesis shows how to determine leaf health status using the Detectron2 software library and the faster R-CNN neural network. The model was trained using a dataset with 6407 images. The initial dataset was extended using the RoboFlow tool. Google Colab, an environment for the development of cloud computing and machine learning, was used for testing and implementation. The practical application of the machine learning model was realized using an application developed using the Flutter platform.