The Center for High Performance Scientific Computing at the NUST School of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science
presents a three days workshop on

"High Performance Scientific Computing"

Registration Closed

NUST School of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science has established a High Performance Computing (HPC) Center, which is the first of its own kind in the Pakistani academia. This HPC center comprises of Sun's mainframe supercomputers like the Sun Fire V890 and clusters built with Sun Ultra and SunBlade workstations. An objective of this high performance facility is to conduct research, development, and evaluation of parallel programming libraries, languages, and
paradigms. This high performance computing center aspires to support scientific computing ranging from forming cosmological structures like galaxies to modeling neurons that form the basis of a brain.

1. Aims of the Workshop
2. Contents for the Workshop
3. Workshop Registration Information
4. Some Introductory Material
5. Dates and Venue
6. Contact Information
7. Workshop Organizers

1. Aims of the Workshop

An aim of the workshop is to introduce the basic concepts of parallel computing. Also we will argue that HPC is solving some of the most important problems in science today by pushing computer hardware and software technology to their limits.

2. Contents for the Workshop

First Day: Introduction to HPC

1. Introduction to the basic concepts of HPC and parallel computing.
   Also this section will motivate the need for HPC and infrastructure
   to support it.
2. Introduction to HPC center facilities at NUST-SEECS.
3. Introduction to HPC parallel hardware: this includes a discussion
   on Massively Parallel Processors (MPP), Symmetric Multi-Processors
   (SMP), and commodity clusters. Also this section will discuss
   the recent emergence of multi-core and SMP processors in commodity
   clusters.
4. Introduction to HPC software: this includes a discussion on
   library-based and language-based approaches to writing parallel
   applications. An example of library-based approach is the Message
   Passing Interface (MPI) standard. Some HPC languages include
   OpenMP and Unified Parallel C (UPC).
5. We will share our experiences of setting up a SunBlade
   cluster at NUST-SEECS. This section includes a brief introduction to
   Solaris. The section shows executing simple C and Java
   programs on this cluster.

Second Day: An In depth Look at MPI, OpenMP, and UPC

1. A detailed introduction to the MPI standard. This section discusses
   some important concepts of MPI. Also we will discuss some
   open-source C and Java MPI libraries. We will demonstrate the
   usage and performance evaluation of such MPI libraries on our
   SunBlade cluster.
2. A detailed introduction to OpenMP. This will include executing
   OpenMP-based C and Java applications on our SunBlade cluster.
3. A detailed introduction to Unified Parallel C (UPC). This includes
   executing a Hello World UPC program.

Third Day: Scientific Computing

1. Gadget-2 is a structure formation code for cosmological
   simulations developed at the Max Planck Institute of Astrophysics.
   This section provides an in depth analysis of this massively
   parallel code. In particular the section discusses algorithms
   used to efficiently compute gravitational forces in a N-body
   system, domain decomposition, and load-balancing.
2. NEURON is a simulation environment to implement biological models of
   neurons and networks of neuron. This section will discuss this simulation
   software and present demonstrations of rather simplistic neurons.
3. Concluding remarks

3. Workshop Registration Information

We have limited places for the attendees!

The workshop registration is through the workshop website only. Those
willing to attend the workshop are kindly requested to fill the online form.

The last date for registration is 25th February (midday) . We will inform the successful attendees by 25th February (evening).

4. Some Introductory Material

We encourage attendees to read through this material.

a. General Reading about Parallel Computing
http://www.llnl.gov/computing/tutorials/parallel_comp
http://www-unix.mcs.anl.gov/dbpp

b. MPI Programming
http://www.llnl.gov/computing/tutorials/mpi

c. OpenMP Programming
http://www.llnl.gov/computing/tutorials/openMP/

d. Unified Parallel C (UPC) Programming
http://upc.lbl.gov/

5. Dates and Venue

6. Contact Information

For more information, please feel free to contact us by email at hpc@niit.edu.pk. Alternatively the workshop organizers can be contacted by telephone or by mail - the information is available from NUST-SEECS's website (http://www.niit.edu.pk).

7. Workshop Organizers

Dr. Arshad Ali
Dr. Aamir Shafi
Mr. Ali Sajjad
Mr. Hammad Siddiqi
Mr. Mohsan Jameel
Mr. Ezhaar Khan

Please visit NUST-SEECS's website (http://www.niit.edu.pk) to learn more about us.