SupercomputinginPlainEnglish.pptVIP

OU Supercomputing Center for Education Research Supercomputingin Plain English Teaching High Performance Computing to Inexperienced Programmers Henry Neeman, University of Oklahoma Julia Mullen, Worcester Polytechnic Institute Lloyd Lee, University of Oklahoma Gerald K. Newman, University of Oklahoma This work was partially funded by NSF-0203481. Outline Introduction Computational Science Engineering (CSE) High Performance Computing (HPC) The Importance of Followup Summary and Future Work Introduction Premises Computational Science Engineering (CSE) is an integral part of science engineering research. Because most problems of CSE interest are large, CSE and High Performance Computing (HPC) are inextricably linked. Most science engineering students have relatively little programming experience. Relatively few institutions teach either CSE or HPC to most of their science engineering students. An important reason for this is that science engineering faculty believe that CSE and HPC require more computing background than their students can handle. We disagree. The Role of Linux Clusters Linux clusters are much cheaper than proprietary HPC architectures (factor of 5 to 10 per GFLOP). They’re largely useful for: MPI large numbers of single-processor applications MPI software design is not easy for inexperienced programmers: difficult programming model lack of user-friendly documentation – emphasis on technical details rather than broad overview hard to find good help BUT: a few million dollars for MPI programmers is much much cheaper than tens or hundreds of millions for big SMPs – and the payoff lasts much longer. Why is HPC Hard to Learn? HPC technology changes very quickly: Pthreads: 1988 (POSIX.1 FIPS 151-1) [1] PVM: 1991 (version 2, first publicly released) [2] MPI: 1994 (version 1) [3,4] OpenMP: 1997 (version 1) [5,6] Globus: 1998 (version 1.0.0) [7] Typically a 5 year lag (or more) between the standar