Notes
Slide Show
Outline
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Introduction to HPC

E. Bruce Pitman
  • Fall 2003
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Need for large scale computing
  • Aerodynamics; CFD
    • complete design of Aerobus
  • Nuclear stockpile testing (ASCI)
    • no future testing
  • Animation/film
    • ~10 hrs compute time per minute of film
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Its more than GHz chips
  • Memory to hold data
  • Bus, wires to move data
  • Cache to deliver data
  • Multiple operations per clock cycle
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Machines
  • Cray C90
  • Cray T3E
  • SGI Origin
  • IBM SP
  • Commodity clusters
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Issues in HPC
  • Architectures
    • shared vs. distributed
  • Basic parallel computing
    • bandwidth, caches, interconnect
  • Programming languages
    • MPI, OpenMP
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