4th Year High Performance Computing

Lecture Notes

• Course Overview
• History of Supercomputers
• Internals of a Typical Computer
• Networks and Communications
• History of Programming Languages
• Programming
• Floating Point Numbers
• Profiling
• Intro to Parallel Programming and OMP
• Optimizing Performance
• Advanced OMP
• Benchmarks
• MPI I
• Parallel Designs
• MPI II
• Tools
• Parallel Examples
• Intro to GPUs
• The Future

Recommended Textbook

The recommended textbooks for this module are:

1. "Computer architecture for scientists: principles and performance" by Andrew Chien, published by Cambridge University Press. This is a very new book - published in 2022 - and is a reasonable overview of architecture and performance issues. As welll as being available for purchase, it is also in the University of York library, and available as a free eBook via library subscription for York students.
2. "Introduction to High Performance Computing for Scientists and Engineers" by Georg Hager & Gerhard Wellein, published by Chapman & Hall/CRC. Copies are available on Amazon etc and the University of York library. The text was up-to-date when published (2011) on all matters of hardware and software but is now a bit dated on hardware. NB It is pitched at a slightly higher level than the original recommended textbook.

The original recommended textbook for this module was "High Performance Computing" by Dowd & Severance, 2nd Edition, published by O'Reilly. This is an excellent introduction to the software side of HPC but is now too dated on hardware details. It has been out-of-print for a long time but you may be able to pick up second-hand copies. A few years ago O'Reilly gave permission for it to be released as a free e-book (3 MB PDF) under a Creative Commons License, and this (effectively 3rd) edition incorporates a number of changes over the paper version.