This modules aims to provide the learner with the necessary knowledge, skills and understanding to program high performance computing systems, and to design and construct high performance computing cluster systems. As high performance computing has become a critical area within industry, the associated skills and experience of parallel and multi-threaded programming have moved centre-stage. Into the future, the ready availability of skilled computing science graduates with such experience will be key to the future of the industry. Specifically, the module aims to- Introduce the learner to the subject of high performance computing, and the associated architectures.- Expose learners to both Message-Passing programming and Shared-Memory programming.- Give learners an appreciation of the difficulties and pitfalls associated with parallel programming.- Provide the learner with an understanding of high performance computing clusters based on the Linux operating system.
Parallel Computers (20%)
- Flynn's taxonomy of HPC architectures- Message-Passing Multicomputers- Parallel Speed-up- Amdahl's Law- Gustafson's Law
Message-Passing Computing (20%)
- Basics of Message-Passing Programming- Software Toolsets- Evaluating Parallel Programs
Embarrassingly Parallel Computations (8%)
- Ideal Parallel Computation - Mandelbrot Set - Monte Carlo Methods
Partitioning and Divide-And-Conquer Strategies (8%)
- Partitioning Strategies - M-ary Divide and Conqueor - Bucket Sort
GPU HPC (8%)
- Pipelined Computations - CUDA
Synchronous Computations (4%)
- Synchronisation - Synchronised Computations
Load Balancing and Termination Detection (4%)
- Static and Dynamic Load Balancing- Distributed Termination Detection Algorithms
Programming with Shared Memory (4%)
- pthreads- OpenMP
Cluster Systems (16%)
- Network Topologies- openMosix- OSCAR & Rocks- Cluster Monitoring & Management- Parallel I/O- Parallel Virtual File System (PVFS)
Green HPC (8%)
- Calculating Power Requirements - Power Management and Cooling - Role of the Job Scheduler - Algorithmic efficiency
| Module Content & Assessment | |
|---|---|
| Assessment Breakdown | % |
| Other Assessment(s) | 40 |
| Formal Examination | 60 |