A High Performance Computing (HPC) Training Workshop was held at Purdue, Aug 6-7 2007, in the Envision Center . This workshop was jointly sponsored by the Computing Research Institute (CRI) and the Rosen Center for Advanced Computing (RCAC).

HPC is playing an increasingly important role in many areas of research in Science and Engineering, and there is an urgent need to train more researchers in the use of this technology. The National Science Foundation is making large investments in HPC to enable research solutions that were not possible in the past. Interestingly, the National Science Board meeting to decide on over $300 million of spending on HPC took place at the same time as our HPC Training Workshop.

The agenda for this workshop was designed to address these needs. A new feature of the workshop was the inclusion of a presentation on multicore architectures by Prof Vijaykumar from Purdue’s ECE Dept, who is a nationally recognized expert in computer architecture. Multicore architectures present a new challenge and an opportunity in all areas of computing including HPC, and including this topic in the workshop was very timely. Other presentations by faculty members covered Parallel Programming Models (Prof. Sam Midkiff, ECE), HPC architectures (Prof Mithuna Thottethodi, ECE) and OpenMP (Prof Rudi Eigenmann, ECE). Additional topics were covered by RCAC staff members, on topics that included MPI programming, the use of the TotalView parallel debugger, the Condor system for accessing unused cycles, and the use of software tools for analyzing performance and increasing programmer productivity.

The hands-on lab sessions were designed to give the workshop attendees a practical feel for the use of HPC resources, and parallel programming techniques.

The response to the workshop was very strong. The hands-on aspect led us to limit the number of attendees we could accommodate to 18, and we had over 25 people wait-listed. We are considering offering the workshop a second time in the near future. The Network for Computational Nanotechnology (NCN) that operates the nanoHUB provided technical support for taping the workshop, which will be made available on the web.

The agenda for the workshop is below.

Monday, Aug 6

Tuesday, Aug 7