FDI_2009
Using Virginia Tech High Performance Computing

As part of one of Virginia Tech's Faculty Development Initiative courses, I gave a number of lectures, from 26-28 May 2009.

PDF versions of the lectures are available by going to ../../presentations/presentations.html.

The following files constitute the LaTeX files used to create the slides:

• fdi_2009_history.tex, "Parallel Programming Prehistory".
• fdi_2009_parallel.tex, "Parallel Programming Concepts".
• fdi_2009_matlab.tex, "MATLAB Parallel Programming".
• fdi_2009_mpi.tex, "MPI Distributed Memory Programming".
• fdi_2009_openmp.tex, "OpenMP Shared Memory Programming".

A few auxilliary files were:

• multimedia.sty, a LaTeX style file;
• vt_logo.pdf, a PDF image of a logo.

The following graphics files were used:

• clockspeeds.png, a plot of computer clockspeeds, showing the "ceiling" at 4 GigaHertz reached around 2003.
• gpu_memory.png, a diagram of the layout of memory in a Graphical Processor Unit (GPU).
• gpu_speed.png, a chart showing the increase in computational rate for Graphical Processor Units (GPU's).
• lightcone.png, a diagram of a lightcone, a concept from physics showing how an event divides spacetime into the past (things that MUST have already happened), space (things that may be going on simultaneously) and the future (things that this event can affect). An analogous situation governs the data used in a numerical computation.
• mandelbrot.png, an image of the Mandelbrot set.
• parallel_matlab.png, a diagram that suggests how multiple copies of MATLAB can cooperate, some on the user's machine and others on a remote system.
• predator_prey.png, a plot of predator and prey populations, as computed by a simple finite difference model.
• protein.png, an image of a protein. A sequence alignment treats a protein as a string of symbols. A pairwise alignment considers all the possible ways of matching successive symbols in two such strings.
• quad_core.png, a diagram of the arrangement of cores and memory in a quad core processor.
• riemann_sum.png, a plot of the Riemann sum method of estimating an integral.
• server_rack.png, a rack of servers, a typical way of stacking stripped down computers in a cluster.
• tasks_beerli.png, a plot of the logical dependence of tasks in Peter Beerli's MIGRATE calculations.
• tasks_gauss.png, a plot of the logical dependence of tasks in Gauss elimination.
• tasks_parallel.png, a plot of how a set of sequential tasks might actually be logically arranged.
• tasks_sequential.png, a plot of how a sequential computer sees a series of tasks.

You can go up one level to the LATEX home page.