XSEDE15

* 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. Content: Older versions of the lecture slides and exercise descriptions (which will be updated) may be found as follows: * Lecture: Overview: What the Heck is Supercomputing? http://www.oscer.ou.edu/ncsiworkshop2012intropar_sipe_overview_20120729.pdf * Lab: Running A Job on a Supercomputer http://www.oscer.ou.edu/ncsiworkshop2012intropar_exercise_learningbatch_boomer_20120729.pdf * Lecture: The Tyranny of the Storage Hierarchy http://www.oscer.ou.edu/ncsiworkshop2012intropar_sipe_storage_20120730.pdf * Lab: Running Benchmarks on a Supercomputer http://www.oscer.ou.edu/ncsiworkshop2012intropar_exercise_tiling_boomer_20120729.pdf Prerequisites: one semester of programming in C or C++, recently; basic experience with any Unix-like operating system (could be Linux but doesn't have to be), recently. (Attendees with Fortran experience will be able to follow along.) No previous HPC experience will be required. Requirements: Laptop (Windows, MacOS or Linux) strongly recommended but not required.