This year’s Gray Scott School is scheduled from 22 June to 4 July 2026, featuring a hybrid format with online sessions, on-site activities in France, and satellite locations across Europe. Traditionally, before the summer school starts, the team will host Gray Scott Thursdays, a series of webinars held almost weekly to discuss key topics like CPU/GPU architectures, unit tests, computing precision, memory allocation, and profiling. These sessions will feature modern programming languages such as C++, Rust, Fortran, and Python, along with libraries including Sycl, EVE, Vulkan, CUDA, Thrust, and PyTorch. The goal of these webinars, led by the school’s professors, is to give early insights into the core concepts and technologies that will be explored in greater depth during the school. All Gray Scott Thursday events are listed on the official Gray Scott School 2026 webpage, and they will also be announced on our webpage.

The school is named after the reaction-diffusion model, which will serve as motivation throughout the program. This problem is simple enough to be quickly understood yet complex enough to challenge compilers and reveal performance limitations. Each method is explored through baseline implementations and progressively optimized versions, allowing participants to compare approaches, quantify performance gains, and discuss trade-offs in a concrete, reproducible way.

Last year, around 500 participants from 14 satellite locations across France, Europe, and North Africa attended the Gray Scott School. The program provided a valuable chance to learn about high-performance computing, simulation, and modern software techniques alongside industry experts. The Gray Scott School 2026 is organized by the Laboratoire d’Annecy de Physique des Particules (LAPP, CNRS – CNRS Nuclei & Particles), in cooperation with the CC-FR Competence Centre.