Illinois HPC Experts Offer Training & Insights in Singapore

11/6/2012 Cheri Helregel, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (chelrege AT illinois.edu)

Several Illinois pioneers of parallel computation visited Singapore to offer hands-on training in high-performance computing the week of June 14-18, 2010.

Written by Cheri Helregel, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (chelrege AT illinois.edu)

Several Illinois pioneers of parallel computation visited Singapore to offer hands-on training in high-performance computing the week of June 14-18, 2010. The weeklong intensive course, which also featured an HPC symposium, was jointly organized by the Advanced Digital Sciences Center, the Institute of High Performance Computing, and the University of Illinois.

Coursework introduced participants to current trends in HPC hardware and software as well as the fundamentals of multicore and GPU programming, distributed memory programming using MPI, PGAS languages and Charm++, and debugging and performance tuning using Eclipse. Fifty research and software engineers attended the training, which was held at the Fusionopolis research and development complex.

Mid-week, Illinois joined research colleagues from Singapore and industry to present a symposium on their latest HPC research. Approximately 120 attendees participated in sessions that highlighted HPC visions as well as the promises and challenges of petascale and exascale.

Illinois presenters for both events included Marc Snir, Bill Gropp, Sanjay Kale, Josep Torrellas, Volodymyr Kindratenko, and Jay Alameda.

Marc Snir is co-PI for the Blue Waters petascale system, associate director for Extreme Scale Computing at NCSA, and co-director of the Intel- and Microsoft-funded Universal Parallel Computing Research Center (UPCRC Illinois).

Bill Gropp is deputy director of research for the Institute for Advanced Computing Applications and Research (IACAT) and leads the Center for Extreme Scale Computation.

Sanjay Kale leads the Parallel Programming Laboratory (PPL) at Illinois, a group that distributes and supports Charm++, Adaptive MPI, and the ParFUM framework.

Josep Torrellas leads the OpenSPARC Center of Excellence and the i-acoma architecture group at Illinois, as well as the Bulk Multicore Architecture project for UPCRC Illinois. Snir, Gropp, Kale, and Torrellas are also professors in the Department of Computer Science at Illinois.

Volodymyr Kindratenko is a senior research scientist in the Innovative Systems Laboratory (ISL) at the NCSA. Jay Alameda is an NCSA Senior Technical Program Manager overseeing systems software projects for Blue Waters.

Archives of slides and other materials for both events are located online at https://adsc.illinois.edu/events/HPC-June2010/agenda.html.

The Advanced Digital Sciences Center is a research center located in Singapore that was established by the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and the Agency for Science, Technology and Research (A*STAR). ADSC is focused on breakthrough innovations in information technology that are expected to have a major impact in transforming human beings' utilization of information technology.

The Institute of High Performance Computing, established under A*STAR, promotes and spearheads scientific advances and technological innovations through computational modeling, simulation and visualization methodologies and tools.

About Parallel@Illinois

Parallel@Illinois has been pioneering and promoting parallel computing research and education for over four decades. Current efforts include the Blue Waters petascale supercomputer, a global Cloud Computing Testbed, a CUDA Center of Excellence, a Center for Extreme Scale Computation, the Joint Laboratory for Petascale Computing, an OpenSPARC Center of Excellence, and the Universal Parallel Computing Research Center. For more information about parallel computing at Illinois, please visit www.parallel.illinois.edu.


Share this story

This story was published November 6, 2012.