EuroPar '97
Uni-Passau FMI Lehrstuhl für Programmierung europar

Morning Tutorials: 09:30 - 12:30, Tuesday, 26. August

Enabling Technologies for High Performance Computing

Jack Dongarra
( University of Tennessee and Oak Ridge National Laboratory, USA)

Who Should Attend

People with an interest in network distributed computing and numerical methods.

Course Description

Wide area computer networks have become a basic part of today's computing infrastructure. These networks connect a variety of machines, presenting an enormous computing resource. In this talk we focus on developing methods and tools which allow a programmer to tap into this resource. We describe tools such as ScaLAPACK, NetSolve, PVM, MPI, and, tools and methodology under development that assists a programmer in developing programs to execute on a parallel computer.

Lecturer (short vita)

Jack Dongarra holds a joint appointment as Distinguished Professor of Computer Science in the Computer Science Department at the University of Tennessee (UT) and as Distinguished Scientist in the Mathematical Sciences Section at Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) under the UT/ORNL Science Alliance Program.
He specializes in numerical algorithms in linear algebra, parallel computing, use of advanced-computer architectures, programming methodology, and tools for parallel computers. Other current research involves the development, testing and documentation of high quality mathematical software. He was involved in the design and implementation of the software packages EISPACK, LINPACK, the BLAS, LAPACK, ScaLAPACK, Netlib, PVM/HeNCE, MPI, the National High-Performance Software Exchange and NetSolve; and is currently involved in the design of algorithms and techniques for high performance computer architectures.

He has published numerous articles, papers, reports and technical memoranda, and has given many presentations on his research interests.


Recent Advances in Parallel Computer Architecture

Per Stenström
( Chalmers University of Technology, Sweden)

Who Should Attend

The tutorial is mainly targeted to practitioners in the field of computer engineering, but also to researchers in computer science who are interested in the state of the art of parallel computer architecture. The tutorial assumes basic knowledge in programming and computer organization and architecture.

Course Description

We cover in this tutorial recent advances in parallel computer architecture. Parallel computer architectures are gaining widespread use, not only for compute-intensive scientific and engineering applications but also for emerging high-performance application domains including various flavors of database management and multimedia processing such as computer graphics.

Since the dominating parallel computer architectures have emerged from computational needs from emerging high-volume applications on one hand, and technological advances on the other, we will in this tutorial cover design principles and performance aspects of mainstream parallel computer architectures. We will first discuss two prevailing programming models for these parallel machines: message-passing (such as MPI and PVM) and shared-memory. We then look into the design principles for architectures that support these programming models directly: symmetric multiprocessors and distributed-memory machines. We then move on to look at machines at the larger scale and will specifically focus on design principles for distributed shared-memory machines. One observation is that both programming models can be efficiently supported under this machine model. Throughout the presentation, we will illustrate many of the design principles with examples of commercial machines.

Some of the concepts that will be covered are

Lecturer (short vita)

Per Stenström is a Professor of Computer Engineering with a chair in computer architecture at Chalmers University of Technology since 1995. He was previously on the faculty of Lund University where he also received his MS degree in Electrical Engineering and PhD degree in Computer Engineering in 1981 and 1990, respectively. Dr. Stenström's research interests are in computer architecture in general with a special emphasis on multiprocessor design and performance analysis as well as compiler optimization techniques. He has published more than 50 papers in these areas and has authored two textbooks on computer architecture and organization. As a visiting scientist, he has participated in major multiprocessor architecture research projects at Carnegie-Mellon, Stanford University, and University of Southern California. He is on the editorial board of the Journal of Parallel and Distributed Computing (JPDC) and has served on numerous programme committees for computer architecture and parallel processing conferences. Dr. Stenström is a member of the IEEE and the Computer Society as well as the ACM and the SIGARCH.


BSP Programming

Jonathan Hill and David Skillicorn
( Oxford University, UK and Queen's University Kingston, Canada)

Who Should Attend

Would you like to be able to write architecture-independent but efficient parallel code? Have you tried MPI and PVM, and would like a simpler alternative?

This tutorial will be of interest to anyone wishing to learn how to develop portable and scalable parallel programs. The only prerequisite is some familiarity with a standard sequential programming language such as C or Fortran.

Course Description

Scalable computing will, over the next few years, become the normal form of computing. Software for scalable computing will have to be fully portable across the whole range of general-purpose parallel architectures, from simple networks of PCs to large parallel supercomputers. It will also have to be efficient, achieving optimised performance, in a predictable way, on all such architectures. The BSP model provides a discipline for the design, analysis and implementation of universal software of this kind. This tutorial provides an introduction to the theory and practice of BSP computing, and shows how it is currently being used to produce portable parallel software for industrial applications. The tutorial will provide an introduction to the principles of BSP cost modeling and performance prediction. It will also show how to design, analyse and implement BSP programs using the various software tools that have been developed to provide a BSP Programming Environment.

Lecturers (short vita)

Jonathan M.D. Hill is a Research Officer at the Oxford University Computing Laboratory and Oxford Parallel. The work he is involved in is a British EPSRC funded project ``Portable Software Tools for Parallel Architectures.'' He was involved in the standardisation of the BSPLib libraries for C and Fortran, and did most of the implementation. He has developed tools for profiling and cost prediction of BSP programs. These tools were successfully used, for example, to predict the performance of a CFD application on an IBM SP-2 from its performance on an SGI PowerChallenge.

David Skillicorn is a Professor in the Department of Computing and Information Science at Queen's University in Kingston, Canada. His research is in models of parallel computation, particularly those properties most important for general-purpose parallelism. He also has a lively interest in software development, implementation, and performance for parallel computing.


(C)opyright by University of Passau, Sven Anders 14.05.1997