Welcome to Programming Super Computers
Description:

Supercomputers offer exceptional compute power and the move to multi-core architectures have increased this power profoundly. Just a few years ago the Fyrkat supercomputer at Aalborg University with its 6.2 teraflops, 84 nodes and total of 672 cores was considered a big machine. Today Fyrkat is still a “workhorse”, but a fairly small machine.

In June 2013, the Tianhe-2 topped the TOP500 list of fastest supercomputers in the world when it achieved 33.86 petaflops using 16,000 computer nodes with 128.000 CPU cores and almost 3.000.000 GPU cores.

At Manchester University in the UK, Professor Steve Furber is building the SpiNNaker machine with 1 million CPU cores. SpiNNaker is a novel computer architecture inspired by the working of the human brain.

All supercomputers nowadays are massively parallel systems, thus exploiting supercomputers requires additional programming skills. This course will introduce you to those skills.

The objectives of the course are for the student to gain insight into:

* Super computer organization

* Programming tools and techniques, including:

o MPI

o OpenMP, OpenCL, CUDA

o Threads in Java, C# and Python

o PyCSP

o Future supercomputing tools

- X10 from IBM and Chapel from Cray

- Fortress, Accelerator for .Net, Scala, F#, Clojure, Erlang

Note we have persuaded Professor Steve Furber to take part and there will be ½ day on programming a machine with 1 million cores.

Format:
Lectures & exercises

Prerequisites:

The course requires some Unix and programming in C, Java or C# experience.

Learning objectives:

Exploiting Super Computers requires additional programming skills. This course will introduce students to those skills.

Organizer:

Bent Thomsen, Associate Professor, email: bt@cs.aau.dk
Lone Leth Thomsen, Associate Professor, email: lone@cs.aau.dk

Lecturers:

Brian Vinter, DTU, Professor,vinter@nbi.ku.dk
Josva Kleist, AAU, Lektor, kleist@cs.aau.dk
Bent Thomsen, AAU, Lektor, bt@cs.aau.dk
Steve Furber, U. Manchester, Professor,steve.furber@manchester.ac.uk


ECTS:
2.5

Time:

November 6-8, 2013

Place:

Aalborg University
"Cassiopeia",
Selma Lagerlöfs Vej 300, room 02.90

Zip code:
9220

City:
Aalborg

Number of seats:


Deadline:
October 1, 2013

To enrol in the course students must sign up via thislink:

https://phd.moodle.aau.dk/login/index.php

Important information concerning PhD courses
We have over some time experienced problems with no-show for both project and general courses. It has now reached a point where we are forced to take action. Therefore, the Doctoral School has decided to introduce a no-show fee of DKK 5,000 for each course where the student does not show up. Cancellations are accepted no later than 2 weeks before start of the course. Registered illness is of course an acceptable reason for not showing up on those days. Furthermore, all courses open for registration approximately three months before start. This can hopefully also provide new students a chance to register for courses during the year. We look forward to your registrations.