CHPC has developed a series of courses to help users make the most of the use of CHPC resources. We continue to add to and improve this series and present it every Fall-Winter. During Spring we present an abbreviated series of our most popular talks. We welcome suggestions for additional presentations.

Fall 2009

• Overview of CHPC
• Statistical Resources at CHPC
• Introduction to Parallel Computing
• Introduction to programming with MPI
• Introduction to Programming with OpenMP
• Mathematical Libraries at CHPC
• Telematic Collaboration with the Access Grid
• NLP Services at CHPC
• Chemistry Packages at CHPC
• Using Gaussian03 and Gaussview
• Hybrid MPI-OpenMP Programming
• Debugging with totalview

Other Presentations

• Parallel performance analysis with TAU
• Fast Parallel I/O at CHPC

Next: September 10th, 2009
Last Presented: February 26th, 2009

by Julia Harrison

This presentation gives users new to CHPC, or interested in High Performance Computing an overview of the resources available at CHPC, and the policies and procedures to access these resources.

Topic covered will include:

• The platforms available
• Filesystems
• Access
• An overview of the batch system and policies
• Service Unit Allocations

Next: September 17th, 2009
Slides (PDF Version)
Last Presented: March 5th, 2009

by Byron Davis

This presentation gives users (and potential users) of CHPC's statistical resources an overview of the equipment and software presently available. Additionally a list of specialized statistical software will be presented that we've supported over the past 10 years or so.

Next Scheduled: September 24th, 2009
Last Presented: March 12th, 2009

by Martin Cuma

In this talk, we first discuss various parallel architectures and note which ones are represented at the CHPC, in particular, shared and distributed memory parallel computers. A very short introduction into two programming solutions for these machines, MPI and OpenMP, will then be given followed by instructions on how to compile, run, debug and profile parallel applications on the CHPC parallel computers. Although this talk is more directed towards those starting to explore parallel programming, more experienced users can gain from the second half of the talk, that will provide details on software development tools available at the CHPC.

Next Scheduled: October 1st, 2009
Last Presented: March 26th, 2009
by Martin Cuma

This course discusses introductory and selected intermediate topics in MPI programming. We base this presentation on two simple examples and explain the MPI parallel development of them. The first example encompasses MPI initialization and simple point to point communication (which takes place between two processes). The second example includes introduction to collective communication calls (where all active processes are involved) and options for effective data communication strategies, such as derived data types and packing the data. Some ideas on more advanced MPI programming options are discussed in the end of the talk.

Next Scheduled: October 8th, 2009
Last presented: December 6th, 2007
by Martin Cuma

This talk introduces OpenMP, an increasingly popular and relatively simple shared memory parallel programming model. Two parallelizing schemes, parallel do loops and parallel sections, were detailed using examples. Various clauses that allow user to modify the parallel execution were also presented, including sharing and privatizing of the variables, scheduling, synchronization and mutual exclusion of the parallel tasks. Finally, few hints were given on removing loop dependencies in order to obtain effective parallelization.

Next Scheduled: October 22nd, 2009
Last Presented: October 30, 2008
by Martin Cuma

In this talk we introduce the users to the mathematical libraries that are installed on the CHPC systems, which are designed to ease the programming and speed-up scientific applications. First, we will talk about BLAS, which is a standardized library of Basic Linear Algebra Subroutines, and present few examples. Then we briefly focus on other libraries that are in use, including freeware LAPACK, ScaLAPACK, PETSc and FFTW.

Next Scheduled: October 29th, 2009
Last presented: October 9, 2008
by Jimmy Miklavcic and Beth Miklavcic

The development of the InterPlay performance series began in 1999 and was built upon the Access Grid infrastructure. It was followed by an emerging first public performance in 2003 and continues to date. It has created many unique challenges and at present, the challenges have matured and multiplied with each subsequent performance. This developmental process, the issues surmounted and those currently being addressed are discussed in this presentation. Beth and Jimmy Miklavcic will provide an overview of the InterPlay performances from 2003 to 2009 and a preview of the Cinematic Display Control Interface being developed by undergraduate researchers Josh Bross and Colin McDermott.

Next Scheduled: November 5th, 2009
Last presented: April 2nd, 2009
by Sean Igo

This presentation is an overview of the equipment and software presently available at CHPC for Natural Language Processing (NLP). It will also cover related resources for general Artificial Intelligence use such as machine learning and data mining, and will include a brief descripton of CHPC's general resources and how to access them.

Next Scheduled: November 12th, 2009
Last Presented: November 13, 2008
by Anita Orendt

This talk will focus on the computational chemistry software packages - Gaussian, Amber, NWChem, Molpro, Dalton, Babel, GaussView, ECCE - that are available on CHPC computer systems. The talk will be an overview of the packages and their capabilities, and will focus on details of how users can access the installations at CHPC.

Next Scheduled: November 19th, 2009
Last Presented: April 9th, 2009
by Anita Orendt

This presentation will focus on the use of Gaussian03 and Gaussview on the CHPC clusters. Batch scripts and input file formats will be discussed. Parallel scaling and timings with the different scratch options (TMP, MM, SERIAL, PARALLEL) will also be presented, along with a discussion of scratch needs of Gaussian03. Finally several demonstrations on the use of GaussView to build molecules, input structures, set up input files and to analyze output files will be presented.

December 3rd, 2009
Last Presented: December 2nd, 2004
by Martin Cuma

In this talk we will introduce hybrid MPI-OpenMP programming model designed for distributed shared memory parallel (DSMP) computers. The CHPC clusters are representative of this family having two or more shared memory processors per node. OpenMP generally provides better performing alternative for parallelization inside a node and MPI is used for communication between the distributed processors. We will discuss cases when hybrid programming model is beneficial and provide examples of simple MPI-OpenMP codes.

Next Scheduled: December 10th, 2009
Last presented: October 23, 2008
by Martin Cuma

This talk introduces Totalview, a debugger that has become a standard in the Unix code development comunity. After short introduction to its major features, we will present three examples, serial, parallel OpenMP and parallel MPI codes. Using these examples, we will show common and specific features for debugging these codes, as well as point out differences in using Totalview on different CHPC platforms.

Next Scheduled: Not scheduled
Last Presented: November 15, 2007
by Martin Cuma

TAU (Tuning and Analysis Utilities) is a profiling and tracing toolkit for performance analysis of parallel programs. In this talk, we will introduce TAU as a new and flexible tool for tracing of parallel programs on CHPC Arches clusters. We detail small changes necessary to turn on the tracing and then explain how to visualize the trace files in Vampir trace viewer. We will conclude with some specific examples and glimpse on other features that TAU provides.

Next scheduled: based upon demand - please let us know if you'd be interested!
by Martin Cuma

In this talk we explain how to perform fast parallel I/O operations on the CHPC computers. It should be beneficial for all users who are interested in speeding up their parallel applications via faster file operations. First, we describe in detail PVFS (Parallel Virtual File System), installed on arches. Then we go over several examples on how to perform parallel I/O on this file system, in particular, MPI-I/O extension to the MPI standard and native PVFS function calls. Subsequently we detail ways how to compile and run MPI-I/O applications on PVFS. We conclude the talk with an insight into some more advanced aspects of MPI-I/O.