Postgraduate Course: HPC Ecosystem (PGPH11073)

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	This course will provide students with an understanding of how HPC is used in the real world, and introduce them to a number of concepts and issues which we consider to be relevant to a professional HPC practitioner. Students will encounter various actors and communities that make up the HPC ecosystem including public and private sector organisations such as governments and vendors. Opportunities to experiment with some of the technologies will be provided via lab-based exercises, and students will undertake a group-based investigative exercise giving them hands-on experience applying concepts covered in the course in the real world. On completion of the course students will have gained an overview of the current place of HPC in the world and how it is used. They will also have gained in-depth knowledge of the topical challenge of reaching exascale levels of computing performance. The course will comprise the following elements: 1. EPCC Core Lectures, covering the following topics: - Distributed computing - Cloud computing - Trends and demographics in HPC - HPC vendors - HPC users and their requirements - HPC system procurement - HPC in Europe - Exascale computing 2. Guest Lectures from HPC vendors, researchers, and users 3. Practicals on: - Cloud computing - HPC system procurement
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 HPC Architectures (PGPH11080)	Co-requisites
Prohibited Combinations		Other requirements	None

Course Delivery Information

Academic year 2017/18, 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 18, Seminar/Tutorial Hours 5, Programme Level Learning and Teaching Hours 2, Directed Learning and Independent Learning Hours 75 )
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: 1.List several current HPC vendors and their products and services 2.Contrast HPC user communities and their differing requirements 3.Plan the acquisition of a university-scale HPC system 4.Explain the roles of the main bodies involved in HPC in Europe 5.Explain the key issues for HPC in the future 6.Summarise the advantages and disadvantages of several computing paradigms 7.Assess the importance of various proposed solutions to the Exascale challenge