XSEDE12

ABSTRACT:

• Lecture: Overview: What the Heck is Supercomputing?
  This session provides a broad overview of High-Performance Computing (HPC). Topics include: what is supercomputing?; the fundamental issues of HPC (storage hierarchy, parallelism); hardware primer; introduction to the storage hierarchy; introduction to parallelism via an analogy (multiple people working on a jigsaw puzzle); Moore's Law; the motivation for using HPC.
• Lab: Running A Job on a Supercomputer
  In this hands-on lab session, you'll get an account on one or more supercomputers, and you'll get a chance to run a job. If your Unix/Linux skills have gotten a little rusty, this will be a great refresher.
• Lecture: The Tyranny of the Storage Hierarchy
  This session focuses on the implications of a fundamental reality: fast implies expensive implies small, and slow implies cheap implies large. Topics include: registers; cache, RAM, and the relationship between them; cache hits and misses; cache lines; cache mapping strategies (direct, fully associative, set associative); cache conflicts; write-through vs. write-back; locality; tiling; hard disk; virtual memory. A key point: Parallel performance can be hard to predict or achieve without understanding the storage hierarchy.
• Lab: Running Benchmarks on a Supercomputer
  In this hands-on lab session, you'll benchmark a matrix-matrix multiply code to discover the configuration that gets the best performance.
• Other topics may be introduced if time permits.

STRONGLY ENCOURAGED: Laptop (Windows, MacOS or Linux); free software might need to be downloaded during the session

PREREQUISITES: One recent semester of programming in C or C++; recent basic experience with any Unix-like operating system (could be Linux but doesn't have to be). (Attendees with Fortran experience will be able to follow along.) No previous HPC experience will be required.,