Parallel Scientific Computing

Aim
Answer questions like

• How to write parallel algorithms (using MPI)?
  (especially PDE related but also other ...)
• Which tasks are good/bad for parallelization?
• How to evaluate the efficiency of a parallel code?

Prerequisites

• Knowledge of numerical analysis and numerics of PDEs
• Interest in programming (there will be lots of it)

Literature

• Van de Velde, E.F., Concurrent Scientific Computing, Springer, 1994
• Wilkinson, B. and Allen, M., Parallel Programming, Prentice Hall, 1999
• Alefeld, G., Lenhardt, I. and Obermaier, H., Parallele numerische Verfahren, Springer 2002
• Quarteroni, A. and Valli, A., Domain Decomposition Methods for Partial Differential Equations

Tutorials
The tutorials are held as practical course in computer room 48/419. On the local machines we will develop and check our programs before running them on the cluster. (If you are asked repeatedly for your password when running MPI programs locally, you should follow these instructions.)

first steps	E1	E2	E3	E4	E5	E6
image processing	E7	E8	E9
sorting	E10
explicit solver	E11
load balancing	E12	E13
iterative solvers	E14	E15

Courses and tutorials on the net

• Introduction to MPI The Complete Standard (course with exercises)
• Parallel Programming Workshop - online (with exercises)
• ETH course on parallel computing (with exercises)

Course material

• Introductions to MPI can be found here and here.
• This detailed specification is taken from the MPI site.
• The TOP500 list (Nov 2002) of supercomputers and the TOP500 site.
• Graph Partitioning - A survey by Ulrich Elsner.
• The METIS package taken from the METIS homepage. Unpack using: gunzip metis-4.0.tar.gz followed by tar -xvf metis-4.0.tar. Go to the new directory metis-4.0 and type make. See metis-4.0/Doc/manual.ps for a manual.
• A nice book on iterative method for large sparse linear systems can be found here. The file is taken from the netlib page.

Hardware

• We will work on the ITWM cluster with 32 nodes, 2 processors each (status)
• Here are short descriptions how to connect and how to start jobs either in batch or interactive mode.