The EuroCC@Turkey High Performance Computing Winter School was held online between the dates 8-13 February 2021. As the first nationwide event to be organized within the EuroCC@Turkey, the school covered a diverse number of topics ranging from modern computing tools such as parallel programming, GPU programming, big data, AI, and machine learning techniques to applied subjects such as computational fluid dynamics and materials modelling. The school included a total of 34 presentations and 7 online training sessions. A total of 2561 participants enrolled, 703 of which participated actively in the hands-on sessions. All presentations were broadcast on YouTube with an average of 250 live audience members. Throughout the week, three informal events were organized, namely Academy Cafe, SME Cafe and Start-up Cafe, where participants and speakers were able to chat in a more relaxed format, away from the necessarily formal structure of the online webinars. The Winter School concluded with a panel where experts from academia and industry came together to discuss HPC-related topics. Although the Winter School was a rather intense, week-long event, the participation sustained at a high level throughout its duration. An exit survey distributed among the participants revealed that the reception was very good with most of the answers to the questions were in the 4/5 or 5/5 range.
Close to half of the participants that filled in the survey declared that they had little or no prior experience in the usage of HPC resources. This result indicates that this event not only brought together the already-active HPC community in Turkey from all areas of academia and industry, it also revealed the potential interest and need for these topics in the future. Encouraged by the reception and the outreach this event provided, the NCC, led by TÜBİTAK ULAKBİM with the participations of Sabancı and Middle East Technical Universities plan to organize many more events throughout the duration of the project, covering both broad-interest and specialized topics. Upcoming activities can be followed from their events web site.