Back To School - Part 1

No it is not the end of August yet (sorry all you parents) but it is time to go back to school.  I am heading off to Redmond for some in depth training and hands-on labs on Windows Compute Cluster Server, also know as HPC or high performance computing.  HPC is a bit of a niche but it is huge in the academic and financial areas.  Microsoft is also relatively new to HPC although CCS has been out for a while.

I attended an internal CCS training day here in Mississauga last September and it was interesting.  It was very cool to see a four node HPC cluster running on standard hardware...

supercomputer

This peaked my interest enough to grab some spare HW at home and build a "supercomputer" but the problem was I really didn't know what to do with it once it was set up.

So back to school I go.  I will be in Building 20 on the Redmond campus next week finding out how to use it once it is set up and filling you in via the blog as I make my way through the labs.

In case you are interested the lab outline is below (uh oh, I see developer stuff!), feel free to shoot me any questions during the week on HPC as I'll have the experts on hand to ask!

1. HPC concepts:

a. What is HPC?

b. Fields of use

c. Parallelization, speedup, efficiency

d. Problem decomposition

e. Parallel programming models, architectures

2. Deploying, managing and tuning Compute Cluster Server

a. out of the box

b. with WDS

c. MOM management pack

d. Tuning for performance with particular attention to Infiniband links

3. The HPC scheduler

a. Job lifecycle

b. Scheduling policies

c. Submitting and managing jobs (gui, command line, programmatically)

4. Development concepts:

a. OpenMP multithread model

b. MPI message-passing model.

c. Porting to CCS & x64

d. Compiling and debugging with VS2005