Introduction to High Performance Computing for Scientists and Engineers

by Georg Hager, Gerhard Wellein

Written by high performance computing (HPC) experts, Introduction to High Performance Computing for Scientists and Engineers provides a solid introduction to current mainstream computer architecture, dominant parallel programming models, and useful optimization strategies for scientific HPC. From working in a scientific computing center, the authors gained a unique perspective on the requirements and attitudes of users as well as manufacturers of parallel computers. The text first introduces the architecture of modern cache-based microprocessors and discusses their inherent performance limitations, before describing general optimization strategies for serial code on cache-based architectures. It next covers shared- and distributed-memory parallel computer architectures and the most relevant network topologies. After discussing parallel computing on a theoretical level, the authors show how to avoid or ameliorate typical performance problems connected with OpenMP. They then present cache-coherent nonuniform memory access (ccNUMA) optimization techniques, examine distributed-memory parallel programming with message passing interface (MPI), and explain how to write efficient MPI code. The final chapter focuses on hybrid programming with MPI and OpenMP. Users of high performance computers often have no idea what factors limit time to solution and whether it makes sense to think about optimization at all. This book facilitates an intuitive understanding of performance limitations without relying on heavy computer science knowledge. It also prepares readers for studying more advanced literature. Read about the authors’ recent

Genres: Computer Science, Engineering, Programming, Textbooks, Computers, Nonfiction

330 pages, Paperback

First published July 2, 2010

Reviews

[Pranjal Singh · Rating 5 out of 5]

This was a true masterpiece for a mechanical engineer who was good at programming but not at all aware of computer architecture at all. I read the book alongside taking a course in high performance computing (CMPSC 450) at Penn State. This book helped me not just do parallel computing but achieve super linear scaling in a problem. For a procedure I use in my simulations, I got a speedup of about 60 times on 20 CPUs!!

[Gregory · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a good introduction to HPC. It is fairly easy to read. There are a few topics I think they went into to much detail on. Things that to me seemed secondary to getting comfortable with parallel programming. Their are other topics I wished they had more details on; however most of these are hardware or implementation dependent. So detail can only be given for specific systems.