Postgraduate Course: Message Passing Programming (INFD11011)
Course Outline
| School | School of Informatics |
College | College of Science and Engineering |
| Credit level (Normal year taken) | SCQF Level 11 (Postgraduate) |
| Course type | Online Distance Learning |
Availability | Available to all students |
| SCQF Credits | 10 |
ECTS Credits | 5 |
| Summary | *This course is delivered online for students on Online Learning programmes within the College of Science and Engineering only. On-campus students interested in the material should refer to INFR11163 - Message-passing Programming*
Parallel programming by definition involves co-operation between processors to solve a common problem. The programmer has to define the tasks that will be executed by the processors, and also how these tasks exchange data and synchronise with each other.
In the message-passing model the tasks are separate processes that communicate by explicitly sending each other messages. All parallel operations are performed via calls to some message-passing interface that is entirely responsible for interfacing with the physical communication network.
This course uses the de facto standard for message passing, the Message Passing Interface (MPI), which is a library callable from C, C++ or Fortran. Parallel programs written using MPI can run on almost any system from a multicore laptop up to the world's largest supercomputers. |
| Course description |
The course makes use of lecture content delivered in both video form and delivered live via e.g. Blackboard Collaborate. Practical activities will be set for students to undertake in their own time in advance of regular tutorial sessions run via Blackboard Collaborate, with discussion and support available from other students, demonstrators, and staff via dedicated discussion areas (e.g. Learn Discussion Boards, Slack).
The course will cover the following topics:
- The message-passing model
- Message-passing parallelisation of a regular domain code
- MPI terminology
- The anatomy of send and receive (synchronous and asynchronous)
- Point-to-point message-passing examples
- Non-blocking operations
- Collectives
- Communicator management
- Derived datatypes (focusing mainly on array subsections)
- Practicalities / Hints and Tips
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Information for Visiting Students
| Pre-requisites | Ability to program in C, C++ or Fortran. |
| High Demand Course? |
Yes |
Course Delivery Information
| Not being delivered |
Learning Outcomes
On completion of this course, the student will be able to:
- Describe the message-passing model in detail.
- Explain the circumstances which cause issues such as deadlock.
- Implement standard message-passing algorithms in MPI.
- Measure and comment on the performance of MPI programs.
- Design, implement and debug efficient parallel programs to solve regular-grid problems.
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Reading List
| "Using MPI: Portable Parallel Programming with the Message-Passing Interface", William Gropp, Ewing Lusk and Anthony Skjellum. |
Additional Information
| Graduate Attributes and Skills |
Project planning.
Project management skills.
Effective written and diagrammatic communication.
Technical writing.
Data collection and analysis. |
| Additional Class Delivery Information |
Fully delivered online |
| Keywords | Programming,message passing,parallel,distributed memory,MPI,HPC,Parallelism |
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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