Fall 2008 -- Learn to Use NCSU HPC Resources
This free short course will be offered in fall break, Thursday, October 9, 9 AM till noon, Thursday, 1:30-4:30 PM, and Friday March 10, 9 AM till noon.
The 3 session short course will be held in the ITTC labs http://www.ncsu.edu/vtour.ittLab.html 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
http://www.ncsu.edu/itd/hpc/About/Contact.php
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.