2020-06-17 ONLINE: PRACE Course: Introduction to hybrid programming in HPC

This course will be delivered as an ONLINE COURSE for remote participation because of the COVID-19 measures enforced by most European governments.

REGISTRATION is strictly NECESSARY since the details to access the online course will be provided to the registered and accepted attendees only.

Furthermore, accepted participants will be contacted about two weeks in advance and asked to provide some more data for the hands-on labs that will be needed for user account creation on the VSC clusters. At that time there will also be a short PRE-ASSIGNMENT that has to be completed before the course starts.

Overview

Most HPC systems are clusters of shared memory nodes. To use such systems efficiently both memory consumption and communication time has to be optimized. Therefore, hybrid programming may combine the distributed memory parallelization on the node interconnect (e.g., with MPI) with the shared memory parallelization inside of each node (e.g., with OpenMP or MPI-3.0 shared memory). This course analyzes the strengths and weaknesses of several parallel programming models on clusters of SMP nodes. Multi-socket-multi-core systems in highly parallel environments are given special consideration. MPI-3.0 has introduced a new shared memory programming interface, which can be combined with inter-node MPI communication. It can be used for direct neighbor accesses similar to OpenMP or for direct halo copies, and enables new hybrid programming models. These models are compared with various hybrid MPI+OpenMP approaches and pure MPI. Numerous case studies and micro-benchmarks demonstrate the performance-related aspects of hybrid programming.

Hands-on sessions are included on all days. Tools for hybrid programming such as thread/process placement support and performance analysis are presented in a "how-to" section. This course provides scientific training in Computational Science and, in addition, the scientific exchange of the participants among themselves.

Content Levels: Beginners = 0:00h (0%) + Intermediate = 1:00h (8%) + Advanced = 11:00h (92%)
(Please note that the content levels refer to the originally planned two days face-to-face course.)

This course is a PRACE training event. It is organized by the VSC Research Center, TU Wien, in cooperation with LRZ, HLRS and RRZE.

Agenda & Content

The online version of the course has been extended to three days (as compared to the originally planned two days face-to-face course) to allow for more time and flexibility with doing the hands-on labs remotely.

1st day – 17 June 2020

08:45   Join online
09:00    Welcome
09:05    Motivation
09:15    Introduction
09:45    Programming Models
09:50       - MPI + OpenMP
10:30   Coffee
11:00       - continue: MPI + OpenMP
12:00          Practical (how to compile and start)
13:00   Lunch
14:30          Practical (hybrid through OpenMP parallelization)
16:00   End of first day

2nd day – 18 June 2020

08:45   Join online
09:00       - Overlapping Communication and Computation
09:30          Practical (taskloops)
10:30   Coffee
11:00       - MPI + OpenMP Conclusions
11:15       - MPI + Accelerators
11:45    Tools
12:00    Programming Models (continued)
12:05       - MPI + MPI-3.0 Shared Memory
13:00   Lunch
14:30          Practical (replicated data)
16:00   End of second day

3rd day – 19 June 2020

08:45   Join online
09:00       - MPI Memory Models and Synchronization
09:40       - Pure MPI
10:00       - Recap - MPI Virtual Topologies
10:30   Coffee
11:00       - Topology Optimization
11:30          Practical/Demo (application aware Cartesian topology)
12:30       - Topology Optimization (Wrap up)
12:45     Conclusions
13:00   Lunch
14:30     Finish the hands-on labs, Discussion, Q & A, Feedback
16:00   End of third day (course)

The content level of the course is broken down as:

Registration form – Registration period is from 30 March 2020 to 2 June 2020, and follows the "first come – first served" principle. For the online course we can take a maximum of 40 persons. Additional registrations will be added to a waiting list.