MPI: Developments and Usage

Tutors

David Henty and Elspeth Minty (Edinburgh Parallel Computing Center)

Summary

Edinburgh Parallel Computing Centre has a long history in the development and promotion of MPI, including representation on the MPI Forum and providing optimised MPI implementations for HPC vendors such as Cray and DEC. EPCC provides technical training, consultancy and support for users of the UK National HPC facilities (including a 512-processor T3D and 256-processor T3E-900), the majority of whom program using MPI. The Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC) funds EPCC as a centre of excellence, providing training materials on distributed computing, and developing applications demonstrators using MPI to illustrate best practice in HPC.

In this half-day tutorial we will cover areas of current and future interest to those employing MPI in real applications, and also anyone teaching MPI programming to novice users.

Topics will include:

Features of MPI-2
Implementation of single-sided communications on the Cray T3D
Performance programming with MPI
Case studies of MPI usage in large application codes
Additional MPI information and training material
MPI interactive distance-learning courseware at EPCC

We intend that the session will be of interest to those with all levels of experience in MPI.

Tutor information

David Henty graduated with a degree in Physics from Imperial College London in 1987, and gained his PhD in Theoretical Physics from Glasgow University in 1990. He spent the next four and a half years doing research in Lattice Field Theory at Edinburgh University. Along the way, he has programmed many different high performance computers including IBM and Cray vector processors, and Meiko i860, CM-200 and Cray T3D/T3E parallel machines. David joined EPCC in 1995 and is now project manager in charge of EPCC's Training and Research activities.

Elspeth Minty joined EPCC in 1993 to work on the TRACS Programme. At the beginning of 1996 she transferred to the EPCC Training and Education Centre and is now the coordinator. In addition to her work at EPCC Elspeth is working on Gravitational Microlensing at the Royal Observatory, Edinburgh.