Tutorial Material

Welcome to the C++ course of the CERN STEAM Academy 2026, taught by Matthias Kretz.

The course runs locally on the academy laptops. This page collects the course materials. For the general computing environment (accounts, WiFi, editors, lxplus, AFS, CERNBox) see the STEAM Academy documentation.

This page provides the material supporting the hands-on work of the C++ tutorial at the CERN STEAM Academy ‘26

Toolchain on the laptops

• Compilers (environment modules): module load gcc/16.1.0 or module load clang/22.1.5.
• Google Benchmark and SFML 3.1 are pulled in automatically by the example’s CMake (FetchContent); the build prerequisites are preinstalled on the laptops.
• Benchmarking: schedtool / chrt / taskset for real-time scheduling without sudo, perf counters enabled, and a writable CPU governor — see the environment docs.

Schedule

The programme is on the Indico timetable.

Exercises

• Compiler Explorer
• Exercise Setup
• Write a simple histogramming application
• Write a benchmark (part 1)
• Benchmark environment — getting interpretable results
• N-Body System Simulation
• Write a benchmark (part 2)
• Hello SIMD World
• More benchmarks
• Nearest Neighbor
• N-Body Simulation with SIMD
• Mandelbrot
• (Some) Solutions

Copyright © 2024–2026 GSI / Matthias Kretz.

License: CC BY-NC-SA 4.0