Meteorology was one of the first disciplines to harness the power of computers, but the idea of using equations to predict the weather predates the computer era. It was first …
In the previous steps we discussed briefly what simulations are and how they are created. However, most of the time people using simulations in their work do not actually write …
Computational science is a rapidly growing interdisciplinary field. There are many problems in science and technology that cannot be sufficiently studied experimentally or theoretically. It may be too expensive or …
How many people haven’t heard about computer simulations? Few, if any. After all, the term has become a part of popular culture. Some people are even suggesting that we are …
The Message-Passing Model is closely associated with the distributed-memory architecture of parallel computers. Remember that a distributed-memory computer is effectively a collection of separate computers, each called a node, connected …
On a computer, a variable corresponds to some piece of information that we need to store in memory. In the traffic model, for example, we need to store all the …
Now we are going to consider how to parallelise a more interesting example than just adding up a list of numbers. First, we will describe how the example works and …
We have seen over the first two weeks that almost all modern computers are parallel computers, consisting of many individual CPU-cores that can be connected together in two different ways: …
We’ve seen how individual CPU-cores can be put together to form large parallel machines in two fundamentally different ways: the shared and distributed memory architectures. In the shared-memory architecture all …
Finally, Wee ARCHIE makes its appearance again! This video uses Wee ARCHIE to explain the parallel computer architecture concepts introduced in this week. It is worth emphasising that the physical …
Because of the difficulty of having very large numbers of CPU-cores in a single shared-memory computer, all of today’s supercomputers use the same basic approach to build a very large …
The fundamental feature of a shared-memory computer is that all the CPU-cores are connected to the same piece of memory. This is achieved by having a memory bus that takes …
To do science in the real world we have to build complicated instruments for each experiment: vast telescopes for astronomers to look deep into space, powerful particle accelerators so physicists …
What is a supercomputer? A supercomputer is a computer with very high-level computational capacities compared to a general-purpose computer such as a personal desktop or laptop. Clearly, this is a …
This course has already run five times in the standard FutureLearn format since it first launched in March 2017. We are still keen for the material to be available for …