Certificate of Achievement
has completed the following course:
Partnership for Advanced Computing in Europe (PRACE) and The University of Edinburgh
Today's supercomputers are the most powerful calculating machines ever invented: today's fastest supercomputers can perform more than a thousand million million calculations every second. This course covered what supercomputers are, how they are built, how they are programmed and how to exploit their full potential. It described how large scale computer simulations are performed with examples of the scientific breakthroughs made possible by supercomputing technology.
5 weeks, 3 hours per week
Dr David Henty
HPC Training and Support, EPCC, The University of Edinburgh
Partnership for Advanced Computing in Europe (PRACE)
Transcript
Learning outcomes
- Describe how the performance of modern supercomputers is measured and achieved
- Explain why they are built from thousands of simple processors
- Compare the architectures of shared-memory and distributed-memory computers
- Describe the shared-variables and message-passing programming models
- Summarise why computer simulation is a fundamental component of modern scientific discovery
- Investigate simple problems and look for opportunities for parallel processing
- Discuss the limitations of parallel computing
- Identify examples of scientific areas where computer simulation is used
Syllabus
- Supercomputers: introducing supercomputing terminology and some of the largest machines in the world
- Parallel computers: how they are built from hundreds of thousands of CPUs, each similar to those in a desktop PC
- Parallel computing: using parallel processing to harness the power of all of those CPUs for a single calculation
- Computer simulation: how we can perform virtual experiments to make real-life predictions
- Case studies: how supercomputing is making scientific breakthroughs that were never possible before
Issued on 4th October 2018
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