Postgraduate Course: HPC Architectures (EPCC11004)
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 | After taking this course students should have a good understanding (from the practioner's perspective) of the way High Performance Computing (HPC) systems are designed and how this affects both the way they are programmed and the performance of applications. |
| Course description |
The course will cover the following topics:
- Basic components of HPC systems: processors, memory, interconnect, storage.
- Classification of architectures: SIMD/MIMD, shared vs distributed memory, clusters
- System software: OSs, processes, threads, scheduling, batch systems.
- Brief history of HPC systems, including Moore's Law.
- CPU design: functional units, instructions sets, pipelining, branch prediction, ILP (superscalar, VLIW, SIMD instructions), multithreading.
- Caches: operation and design features
- Memory: operation and design features, including cache coherency and consistency
- Multicore CPUs, including cache and memory hierarchy
- GPGPUs: operation and design features
- Interconnects: operation and design features
- Current HPC architectures
Lectures will be followed by tutored practical sessions illustrating the key concepts.
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Entry Requirements (not applicable to Visiting Students)
| Pre-requisites |
|
Co-requisites | |
| Prohibited Combinations | |
Other requirements | None |
Information for Visiting Students
| Pre-requisites | Practical exercises will require students to be able to read and udnerstand programmes written in C. The course looks at hardware as it relates to HPC, thus familiarity with different hardware components outwith an HPC context will be beneficial.
N.B. This is a postgraduate level course not an introductory course for undergraduate students. |
| High Demand Course? |
Yes |
Course Delivery Information
|
| Academic year 2024/25, Available to all students (SV1)
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Quota: 75 |
| Course Start |
Semester 1 |
Timetable |
Timetable |
| Learning and Teaching activities (Further Info) |
Total Hours:
100
(
Lecture Hours 20,
Supervised Practical/Workshop/Studio Hours 10,
Feedback/Feedforward Hours 1,
Formative Assessment Hours 1,
Summative Assessment Hours 2,
Revision Session Hours 1,
Programme Level Learning and Teaching Hours 2,
Directed Learning and Independent Learning Hours
63 )
|
| Assessment (Further Info) |
Written Exam
90 %,
Coursework
10 %,
Practical Exam
0 %
|
| Additional Information (Assessment) |
Written Exam 90%
Coursework (Class test) 10%
Written examination comprised of 3 compulsory questions (equally weighted).
Coursework (class test) is an examination question presented to the students mid-Semester. This will be undertaken in time-limited conditions similar to an exam but during the course and providing students a mid-Semester opportunity to judge their progress and identify (with the help of feedback) any area(s) of weakness. |
| Feedback |
Via practical class exercises, coursework and on the exam. |
| Exam Information |
| Exam Diet |
Paper Name |
Hours & Minutes |
|
| Main Exam Diet S1 (December) | HPC Architectures | 2:120 | |
Learning Outcomes
On completion of this course, the student will be able to:
- Understand the key components of HPC architectures and be able to apply this understanding to specific examples
- Understand the basic principles of operation of these components, how they interact, and be able to analyse this operation
- Evaluate the main design choices and trade-offs in HPC architecture.
- Understand how the components are put together to form complete systems and analyse such systems
- Explain the balance between HPC system software and hardware in terms of system management
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Reading List
| Provided via Learn/Leganto |
Additional Information
| Graduate Attributes and Skills |
Solution Exploration, Evaluation and Prioritisation.
Critical thinking
Communication of complex ideas in accessible language
Working in an interdisciplinary field
Programming and Scripting |
| Special Arrangements |
There are limited spaces on this course. Students not on the MSc in High Performance Computing or MSc High Performance Computing with Data Science should contact the course secretary to confirm availability and confirm that they have the required prerequisites before being enrolled on the course. |
| Keywords | Computer Architectures,HPC,HPCA,HA,EPCC,High Performance Computing,Parallelism,Parallel,Filesystems |
Contacts
| Course organiser | Dr David Henty
Tel: (0131 6)50 5960
Email: d.henty@ed.ac.uk |
Course secretary | Mr James Richards
Tel: 90131 6)51 3578
Email: J.Richards@epcc.ed.ac.uk |
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