It was designed to be portable and efficient, and implementations of MPI are available on a wide variety of platforms. MPI subroutines can be called from Fortran-77 or C programs, so that codes can be run in parallel on clusters of different workstations and also on supercomputers. This SP2 has a total of 48 processors and 65.2 GBytes of disk space, an overall performance of 15 GFlops and a total memory of 8 GBytes. The lab exercise sessions will give participants hands-on experience on the proper use of MPI and of the SP2 in scientific programming. A variety of programming techniques, tools, and algorithms will be reviewed.
Scientists can nowadays get fairly easy access to very powerful computing resources.
However, the process of improving computer codes in order to maximize its megaflops rate is most often a challenging and complicated task. In this workshop we will review general concepts of scientific computing and performance and introduce techniques that can significantly improve the performance. The math behind the program, or how simple changes in the numerical method can often improve speed and memory utilization. Improving single processor performance, by looking at issues such as memory management and data representations. Appropriate array indexing, loop unrolling, and other techniques will be analyzed and exemplified.