Postgraduate Course: Advanced Message-Passing Programming (EPCC11012)
Course Outline
| School | School of Informatics |
College | College of Science and Engineering |
| Credit level (Normal year taken) | SCQF Level 11 (Postgraduate) |
Availability | Available to all students |
| SCQF Credits | 10 |
ECTS Credits | 5 |
| Summary | Modern parallel supercomputers are predominantly programmed using the Message-Passing Interface (MPI) library. Learning the basic MPI syntax and writing medium-scale programs is relatively straightforward, but many issues only arise when tackling large-scale problems on thousands of processes. Typical issues include deadlock, poor scalability or inefficient file IO.
There are two basic ways to address these issues. The fundamental MPI calls can be used in more sophisticated ways, which requires an in-depth understanding of the finer details of the MPI standard and its implementation in real libraries. Alternatively, different approaches can be used which employ advanced MPI functionality or which exploit the shared-memory nature of modern multicore compute nodes. Before any correctness or performance issues can be addressed they must first be diagnosed, so knowledge of parallel profiling and debugging is essential. |
| Course description |
The course will cover the following topics:
- Advanced derived datatypes
- Advanced collective operations & user-defined reduction operations
- Advanced virtual topologies
- Neighbourhood collective operations
- Persistent communication requests
- One-sided operations
- MPI shared-memory
- Hybrid programming
- Parallel IO
- MPI Internals
- Tools for MPI
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Information for Visiting Students
| Pre-requisites | - Functional knowledge of C or FORTRAN is mandatory.
- Functional knowledge of Message-Passing Programming / MPI is mandatory.
- Functional knowledge of Threaded programming / OpenMP is recommended. |
Course Delivery Information
|
| Academic year 2023/24, Available to all students (SV1)
|
Quota: 84 |
| Course Start |
Semester 2 |
Timetable |
Timetable |
| Learning and Teaching activities (Further Info) |
Total Hours:
100
(
Lecture Hours 22,
Supervised Practical/Workshop/Studio Hours 22,
Summative Assessment Hours 5,
Revision Session Hours 1,
Programme Level Learning and Teaching Hours 2,
Directed Learning and Independent Learning Hours
48 )
|
| Assessment (Further Info) |
Written Exam
0 %,
Coursework
100 %,
Practical Exam
0 %
|
| Additional Information (Assessment) |
100% coursework via 10 weekly class tests |
| Feedback |
Via practical classes, discussions in lectures and class tests. |
| No Exam Information |
Learning Outcomes
On completion of this course, the student will be able to:
- Describe the various factors that limit performance in large-scale message-passing applications
- Apply knowledge of the design and implementation of the MPI library to optimise the performance of parallel programs
- Use advanced MPI functionality to exploit the architectural features of modern HPC systems
- Implement efficient parallel approaches for general unstructured problems
- Compare the pros and cons of different approaches to parallel IO
|
Reading List
"Using Advanced MPI: Modern Features of the Message-Passing Interface", William Gropp, Torsten Hoefler, Rajeev Thakur and Ewing Lusk.
Any further material provided via Learn/Leganto |
Additional Information
| Graduate Attributes and Skills |
Ability to address complex problems using methodical approaches.
Application of learning.
Ability to understand and apply technical documentation.
Programming.
Parallel Programming |
| Keywords | Advanced MPI,MPI,Parallelism,EPCC,HPC,Message-passing,Programming,High Performance Computing |
Contacts
| Course organiser | Mr Ludovic Capelli
Tel: (01316) 506709
Email: l.capelli@epcc.ed.ac.uk |
Course secretary | Mr James Richards
Tel: 90131 6)51 3578
Email: J.Richards@epcc.ed.ac.uk |
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