Online Shared-memory programming with OpenMP
ARCHER, the UK's national supercomputing service offers training in software development and high-performance computing to scientists and researchers across the UK.
Details
Almost all modern computers now have a shared-memory architecture with multiple CPUs connected to the same physical memory, for example multicore laptops or large multi-processor compute servers. This course covers OpenMP, the industry standard for shared-memory programming, which enables serial programs to be parallelised easily using compiler directives. Users of desktop machines can use OpenMP on its own to improve program performance by running on multiple cores; users of parallel supercomputers can use OpenMP in conjunction with MPI to better exploit the shared-memory capabilities of the compute nodes.
This course will cover an introduction to the fundamental concepts of the shared variables model, followed by the syntax and semantics of OpenMP and how it can be used to parallelise real programs. Hands-on practical programming exercises will be included, with access to HPC provided for the duration of the course.
Trainer
Mark Bull
Mark teaches on EPCC's MSc in High Performance Computing and delivers many of our 'Shared-memory programming with OpenMP' and 'Single node optimisation' courses. He is EPCC's representative on the OpenMP standards body, and has been training computational scientists for over 20 years.
Format
This online course will run over four sessions on consecutive Wednesday afternoons, each running 14:00 - 16:30 UTC (15:00 - 17:30 CET) with a half-hour break 15:00-15:30 UTC (16:00 - 16:30 CET), starting on Wed 13th November with the last session on Wed 4th December.
We will be using Blackboard Collaborate for the course, which is very simple to use and entirely browser-based.
Collaborate usually works without problems with modern browsers, but Firefox or Chrome is recommended. Links to join each of the sessions will be published on the course materials page.
Attendees will register for the course in the usual way using the registration form.
Computing requirements
All attendees will need their own desktop or laptop with the following software installed:
- web browser - e.g. Firefox or Chrome
- pdf viewer - e.g. Firefox, Adobe Acrobat
and
- ssh client
- on Mac/Linux then Terminal is fine,
- on Windows we recommend MobaXterm which provides an SSH client, inbuilt text file editor and X11 graphpics viewer plus a bash shell envioronment. Although this is a bigger install, it is recommended (instead of putty and xming) if you will be accessing HPC machines regularly. There is a 'portable' version of MobaXterm which does not need admin install privilages.
- on Windows, if you are not using MobaXterm, you can use putty from https://www.putty.org/ - xming X11 graphics viewer,
- for Mac https://www.xquartz.org/,
- for Windows (if you are not using MobaXterm) http://sourceforge.net/projects/xming/files/Xming/6.9.0.31/Xming-6-9-0-31-setup.exe/download
We have recorded an ARCHER Screencast: Logging on to ARCHER from Windows using PuTTY
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oVFQg1qFjKQ
Logging on to Cirrus is very similar, but substitute login.cirrus.ac.uk as the login address.
We will provide accounts on the Cirrus system for all attendees who register in advance.
Course Materials
All the course materials, including lecture notes and exercise materials are available on the Course Materials page.
In addition, links to join each of the four online sessions, and recordings of previous sessions will be available on the course materials page.
