This E-Planet visit was hosted by the ALICE Brazilian group in the University of Sao Paolo (USP). The Brazilian group is engaged in ALICE physics analysis, while it also operates a Tier-2 centre of the Worldwide LHC Grid (WLCG).  The group is keen to contribute to the future re-engineering of the ALICE code in a way that will exploit parallelism.To support these activities, the SFT group prepared a dedicated series of lectures introducting the “many-core era” of processor design, teaching the basic tools of parallel programming and disucssing various approaches to this type of programming. The lectures go along with hands-on exercises based on real-life examples of HEP applications.<!--break-->
This lecture series was given by Benedikt Hegner, an expert on LHC experiments’ reconstruction and analysis software. The lecture series was well received and the number of participants increased over time. The visit was a success and subsequently two PhD students were engaged in new concurrency activities in ALICE. The work of one of the students is the result of the effective collaboration between the Brazilian ALICE group and the group of Prof. Takeo in the UPS engineering department. The aim of this visit was achieved thanks to the close collaboration between SFT members and the local organizers. The lectures triggered interesting discussions among the participants and motivated further collaboration between different groups. Transferring knowledge to the local group is an important objective for the members of the SFT group, as they should get involved in the effort of re-engineering large parts of the code used for data analysis and processing by the LHC experiments.

Lecture announcement and material at USP:
http://sampa.if.usp.br/drupal/node/133

Article by the hist group in "ALICE Matters":
http://alicematters.web.cern.ch/?q=USPworkshop

Issue of the PH newsletter:
http://ph-news.web.cern.ch/content/sft-members-contributing-workshops-parallel-programming-computing-0