| Course overview | Schedule | Resources |
Course description: This is a special topic course focused on an in-depth study of parallel applications' performance, with an emphasis on cross-platform performance comparison and especially, the inclusion of I/O operations in predicting the overall performance of large parallel applications. This course covers a variety of topics in parallel performance analysis and prediction, as well as new research issues in the grid computing environment. Students will be requested to perform literature study, give in-class paper presentation, and collaborate on a group research project.
Instructor: Xiaosong Ma
Time and location: Wednesday 1-3pm, 337 EGRC
Prerequisites: Operating system and computer architecture courses
To register: Please contact the instructor.
Grading policy: written reviews 20%, class participation 30% (10% presentation, 20% in-class discussion), project 50%.
Late policy:
Calculated by the time recorded in the assignment emails received to the instructor.
RAs: every half hour after the due time (noon), 10% off the credit.
PAs: every hour after the due time (noon), 10% off the credit.
| Week # | Date | Topics | Reading assignment (RA) | Project assignement (PA) | Deadlines |
| 1 | 08/20 | Course overview, introduction to parallel computing | What is the Grid
by Ian Foster, 2002 RA1: Matchmaking: Distributed Resource Management for High Throughput Computing by Rajesh Raman, Miron Livny, Marvin Solomon, HPDC 1998. |
Get accounts on the course cluster and learn to run parallel programs
(get started). Two sample C programs calculating the value of pi: integral and monte carlo PA1: test the accuracy and scalability of "integral" and "monte carlo" on the class cluster, using 1, 2, 4, and 8 processors. |
None |
| 2 | 08/27 | Grid resource management, MPI-IO An MPI-IO tutorial (PPT) by Rajeev Thakur RA1 Presenter: Jaydeep |
RA2: Globus: A Metacomputing Infrastructure Toolkit by Ian Foster and Carl Kesselman, The International Journal of Supercomputer Applications and High Performance Computing, 1996 | PA2 | RA1, M 08/25 PA1, W 08/27 |
| 3 | 09/03 | MPI-IO (continued), parallel I/O performance RA2 Presenter: Wei |
RA3: Data Sieving and Collective I/O in ROMIO by Rajeev Thakur, William Gropp and Ewing Lusk, the Seventh Symposium on the Frontiers of Massively Parallel Computation, 1999 | PA3 | RA3, M 09/08 PA3, W 09/10 |
| 4 | 09/10 | RA3 Presenter: Salil |
RA4: Effective File-I/O Bandwidth Benchmark by Rolf Rabenseifner and Alice Koniges, Euro-Par 2000 | PA4 | RA3, M 09/08 PA3, W 09/10 |
| 5 | 09/17 | RA4 Presenter: Salil |
RA5: Automated Performance Prediction for Scalable Parallel Computing by Mark Clement and Michael Quinn, Parallel Computing, 23(10), 1997 | Preliminary parallel I/O performance modeling | RA4, M 09/15 PA4, W 09/17 |
| 6 | 09/24 | No lecture | RA6: Information and Control in Gray-Box Systems by Andrea Arpaci-Dusseau and Remzi Arpaci-Dusseau, SOSP, 2001 | ||
| 7 | 10/01 | Portable performance modeling RA5 Presenter: Vikram RA6 Presenter: Jaydeep | RA7: Latency Metric: An Experimental Method for Measuring and Evaluatin g Parallel Program and Architecture Scalability by Xiaodong Zhang, Yong Yan and Keqiang He, Journal of Parallel and Distributed Computing, 22(3), 1994 | MPI-I/O benchmarking on multiple clusters | RA5-6, M 09/29 PA5, M 09/29 |
| 8 | 10/08 | Portable performance modeling (cont.) RA7 Presenter: Vikram | RA8: A Multi-Storage Resource Architecture and I/O Performance Prediction for Scientific Computing by Xiaohui Shen and Alok Choudhary, HPDC, 2000 | RA7, M 10/06 PA7, W 10/08 |
|
| 9 | 10/? | RA8 Presenter: Jaydeep | RA9: Dynamic Statistical Profiling of Communication Activity in Distributed Applications by Jeffrey Vetter, SIGMETRICS, 2002 | RA8, M 10/13 PA8, W 10/15 |
|
| 10 | 10/22 | RA9 Presenter: Salil | RA10: Predicting Application Run Times Using Historical Information by Warren Smith, Ian Foster, and Valerie Taylor, IPPS Workshop on Job Scheduling Strategies for Parallel Processing, 2002 | RA9, M 10/20 PA9, W 10/22 |
|
| 11 | 10/29 | RA10 Presenter: Vikram | RA11: Resource Selection Using Execution and Queue Wait Time Predictions, by Warren Smith and Parkson wong, NAS Technical Report, 2002. | PA11 | RA10, M 10/27 PA10, W 10/29 |
| 12 | 11/05 | RA11 Presenter: Salil | RA12: Using Disk Throughput data in Predictions of End-to-End Grid Data Transfers , by Sudarshan Vazhkudai and Jennifer Schopf, Grid Workshop, 2002. | PA12 | RA11, M 11/03 PA11, W 11/05 |
| 13 | 11/12 | RA12 Presenter: Vikram | RA13: Parallel Simulation of Parallel File Systems and I/O Programs, by Rajive Bagrodia, Stephen Docy, and Andy Kahn, Supercomputing, 1997. | PA13 | RA12, M 11/10 PA12, W 11/12 |
| 15 | 11/25 | RA13 Presenter: Jaydeep | PA14 | RA13, M 11/24 PA13, W 11/24 |
|
| 16 | 12/03 | Project result discussion and summary | PA14, W 12/03 |
MPI:
MPI Standard 1.1 (Use as MPI
message passing reference)
MPI Standard 2.0 (Use as MPI-IO reference)
ROMIO (MPICH's MPI-IO implementation)
Recommended books :
Parallel Computer Architecture: A Hardware/Software Approach
The Grid: Blueprint for a New Computing Infrastructure
Parallel I/O for High Performance Computing
Course clusters:
The OS cluster configuration
NCSU HPC center