Hyatt Regency Minneapolis on Nicollet Mall
Bowen Alpern, IBM T. J. Watson Research Center, and Larry Carter, University of California, San Diego and San Diego Supercomputer Center.
Performance programming seeks to improve performance beyond what is achieved by programming an algorithm in the most expedient manner. The goal is to keep each processing element as busy as possible doing useful work. This entails satisfying four requirements: breaking problems into independent subproblems that can be executed concurrently, distributing these subproblems appropriately among the processing elements, making sure that the necessary data is close to its processing element, and overlapping communication with computation where possible. To attain high performance, these requirements must be satisfied whether one views "processing elements" as stages of an arithmetic or vector pipeline, functional units of a CPU, processors of a tightly coupled shared-memory multiprocessor, nodes of a distributed-memory supercomputer, or heterogeneous computers on a network. This tutorial presents general techniques for satisfying each of these requirements and illustrates their use at many different levels of application.
30% beginner; 50% intermediate; 20% advanced
The tutorial will use extended examples, including two-dimensional seismic migration, protein matching, and computational linear algebra (matrix factoring, matrix multiplication, and its degenerate cases). Seismic migration is a representative of certain partial differential equation problems, protein matching is a typical dynamic programming application, and linear algebra is ubiquitous. Other examples will be introduced to illustrate particular points. While we will survey a large number of topics and techniques, the emphasis will be on mastering conceptual structures and understanding general principles rather than on learning details.
The tutorial is intended for computational scientists, application developers, and other professionals who have a need to design, implement, or tune high-performance scientific programs. It should also be of interest to computer scientists who want to develop languages, compilers, operating systems, architectures, and performance monitoring and debugging tools that can better support the needs of the performance programming community.
Bowen Alpern received a Ph.D. in Computer Science from Cornell University in 1986. He has been a Research Staff Member in the Mathematical Sciences Department of the IBM T. J. Watson Research Center since 1986. His research interests include performance programming, visualization of computation and architecture, theoretical models of hierarchical memory and parallelism, distributed and parallel computing, message compression, computational linear algebra, and portable high-performance computing. He has published more that twenty-five technical papers in computer science. He taught a graduate-level course in performance programming for the Computer Science Department of Columbia University in 1994.
Larry Carter is a Professor in the Computer Science and Engineering Department of the University of California at San Diego, and a Senior Fellow at the San Diego Supercomputer Center. Dr. Carter received his Ph.D. from the University of California at Berkeley in 1974, and worked until 1994 at IBM's T. J. Watson Research Center in the areas of probabilistic algorithms, compilers, VLSI testing, and high-performance computation. His current research interests include scientific computation, performance programming, parallel computation, and machine and system architecture for high-performance computing.
Bowen and Larry developed the matrix multiplication package initially released with the RS/6000 and helped implement the NAS benchmarks on the IBM SP.
8:00 Registration
10:00-10:30 Coffee
12:30-2:00 Lunch
3:30-4:00 Coffee
5:30 Short Course adjourns
The short course will take place on 2nd Floor in Greenway F-H; coffee breaks will be in Promenade area 2nd Floor; and lunch will be in Greenway A-B/I-J.
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