High Performance Computing - Courses
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Courses
Spring 2009—Learn to Use NCSU HPC Resources
This free short course takes about 9 hours altogether. It will be offered in spring break, starting Tuesday, March 3, 9 AM till noon, Wednesday, March 4, 9 AM till noon PM, and Friday March 6, 9 AM till noon. The 3 session short course will be held in the ITTC labs in the D.H. Hill main NCSU library. If you e-mail me (Gary Howell, gary_howell@ncsu.edu) in advance I can be sure to have enough course materials on hand.
Class notes can be downloaded at Intro to MPI. Sample codes can be downloaded from sample.tar.gz.
Graduate students, postdocs, faculty and staff who are likely to use parallel computation in research projects or theses are particularly invited. Before class starts, students who do not already have a Blade Center account are encouraged to have their advisors request them so they can have a permanent account. Faculty can request accounts for themselves and for their students online from our Contacts page.
NC State currently has almost one thousand processors available for high performance computing. This short course introduces the use of the machines, starting with how to log on and submit jobs. The course introduces the use of MPI (Message Passing Interface), the standard library for message passing parallel computation. Calls to MPI are embedded in Fortran, C, or C++ codes, enabling many processors to work together to accomplish a parallel computation.
Session 1. How to log into the HPC machines and submit jobs. Why to use parallel computation. Some simple MPI commands and example programs. The last half of the time will be spent in getting an example code to run. A version of the lab is Lab 1.
Session 2. MPI Collective communications. These can be simple and efficient. Considerations in efficient parallel computation. Running some more codes. The lab is Lab 2.
Session 3. Some of the more advanced features of MPI. Some other libraries useful in scientific computation. The topics on the last day may depend on class interests. Lab 3.
Faculty
Gary Howell taught math and CS for 15 years at Florida Tech. Supercomputing experience has included NSF, DOE, NIH, and NASA funded research projects, service on the MPI and BLAS standards boards, and as an HPC consultant for Hewlett Packard at the ERDC supercomputer center. He currently works for NCSU/ITD in helping faculty sponsored research projects use the NCSU computational research facilities.
Some previous courses introduce parallel debugging, profiling, and OpenMP (shared memory programming). See Previous Courses [Previous courses and links to class notes.]