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DRPS : Course Catalogue : School of Informatics : Informatics - Distance Learning

Postgraduate Course: Advanced Message Passing Programming (INFD11022)

Course Outline
SchoolSchool of Informatics CollegeCollege of Science and Engineering
Credit level (Normal year taken)SCQF Level 11 (Postgraduate)
Course typeOnline Distance Learning AvailabilityNot available to visiting students
SCQF Credits10 ECTS Credits5
SummaryModern 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:
- Scalability challenges for parallel programs
- MPI Internals
- Parallel profiling and debugging
- Message-passing optimisations
- Advanced communicator management
- Advanced use of MPI collectives
- Hybrid message-passing and shared-memory programming
- Unstructured meshes
- Advanced load-balancing techniques
- Parallel file systems and parallel IO
Entry Requirements (not applicable to Visiting Students)
Pre-requisites Co-requisites
Prohibited Combinations Other requirements None
Course Delivery Information
Not being delivered
Learning Outcomes
On completion of this course, the student will be able to:
  1. Describe the various factors that limit performance in large-scale message-passing applications
  2. Apply knowledge of the design and implementation of the MPI library to optimise the performance of parallel programs
  3. Use advanced MPI functionality to exploit the architectural features of modern HPC systems
  4. Implement efficient parallel approaches for general unstructured problems
  5. Compare the pros and cons of different approaches to parallel IO
Reading List
None
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
Special Arrangements Please note this course is an Online Learning module. On-campus students should instead refer to INFR11169 - Advanced Message-passing Programming
KeywordsAdvanced MPI,MPI,Parallelism,EPCC,HPC,Message-passing,Programming,High Performance Computing,Online
Contacts
Course organiserDr David Henty
Tel: (0131 6)50 5960
Email: d.henty@ed.ac.uk
Course secretaryMr James Richards
Tel: 90131 6)51 3578
Email: J.Richards@epcc.ed.ac.uk
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