Postgraduate Course: Advanced Parallel Programming (PGPH11074)

Course Outline
School	School of Physics and Astronomy	College	College of Science and Engineering
Credit level (Normal year taken)	SCQF Level 11 (Postgraduate)	Availability	Not available to visiting students
SCQF Credits	10	ECTS Credits	5
Summary	The course will cover the following topics: - Scalability challenges - Leading-edge HPC architectures - MPI Internals - Message-passing optimisations - Parallel performance tools - Performance modelling - Single-sided protocols - Exploiting heterogeneous architectures - Advanced load-balancing techniques - Parallel file systems and parallel IO - Verification and fault tolerance - Choice of programming model/language These are all generic topics but would be demonstrated in practice on a particular architecture, eg we would use HECToR for the first couple of years.
Course description	Not entered

Entry Requirements (not applicable to Visiting Students)
Pre-requisites	Students MUST have passed: Message-Passing Programming (PGPH11078) AND Threaded Programming (PGPH11077) It is RECOMMENDED that students have passed Parallel Programming Languages (PGPH11072) AND HPC Architectures (PGPH11080)	Co-requisites
Prohibited Combinations		Other requirements	None

Course Delivery Information

Academic year 2015/16, Not available to visiting students (SS1)		Quota: None
Course Start	Semester 2
Timetable	Timetable
Learning and Teaching activities (Further Info)	Total Hours: 100 ( Lecture Hours 22, Seminar/Tutorial Hours 11, Summative Assessment Hours 2, Programme Level Learning and Teaching Hours 2, Directed Learning and Independent Learning Hours 63 )
Additional Information (Learning and Teaching)	Please contact the School for further information
Assessment (Further Info)	Written Exam 100 %, Coursework 0 %, Practical Exam 0 %
Additional Information (Assessment)	100% examination consisting of a two hour exam
Feedback	Not entered
Exam Information
Exam Diet	Paper Name		Hours & Minutes
Main Exam Diet S2 (April/May)			2:00

Learning Outcomes
On completion of this course students should be able to: - Describe the various factors that limit scalability in large-scale parallel programs - Diagnose parallel performance problems using analysis tools. - Design and apply appropriate parallel optimisation techniques. - Exploit an understanding of the architectures of HPC systems to write more efficient parallel codes. - Implement appropriate correctness tests in simulation codes.