Workshop: Introduction to Parallel Programming - 21 February 2014, Palmerston North

9:00-9:30am

Registration and Welcome

9:30-9:45am

We'll introduce the speakers and NeSI's Computational Science Team. The Computational Science Team is made up of experts from around the country who work with research groups to assist them with their research.

9:45-11:00am

Introduction to Parallel Programming
Jaison Mulerikkal

This session will expose the audience to some concepts used in HPC and scientific programming in general.

We will start by looking at ways to split problems into manageable chunks that can be processed in parallel, known as problem decomposition. The session will be rich with examples, from bioinformatics to physics.

Further on, more terminology will be introduced. The audience will be exposed to the concepts of task and data parallelism. We will also look at what it means for something to be "embarrassingly parallel" or "tightly coupled".

As we near the end, we will cover some of the issues related to dealing with memory in an HPC system. In particular, we'll split the problem between sharing memory in a single node and working with memory across nodes in distributed system. This will bring us towards OpenMP and MPI, which are explained in depth later in the day.

11:00-11:30am

Morning Tea

Parallel Programming - OpenMP
Gene Soudlenkov

OpenMP is a technique for sharing memory between processes within a single hardware node. What is interesting about the technique is that legacy code that uses tight loops can be sped up with simple compiler #pragmas.

As well as providing a theoretical overview, Gene will be running code directly on NeSI's facilities.

1:00-2:00pm

Lunch

Parallel Programming - MPI
Charles Bacon

The Message Passing Interface (MPI) is the de facto standard for parallel computing on high performance computing clusters.  Charles will cover the primitives offered by MPI and how they can be combined to perform meaningful parallel computations.  He will also cover some performance optimisations, debugging techniques, and parallel libraries that can be used by applications.

Using NeSI HPC Resources
Jordi Blasco

Learn about each of NeSI's HPC facilities and how to submit work to them. We will be covering a number of different techniques. Each has its own trade off between simplicity and customisability.

Wrap up
Whole Team

The audience will be invited to contribute to a roundtable discussion about how HPC might enhance their respective research programmes.  Each of the speakers from the day will be available for questions and will be happy to provide advice.