Introduction to Hybrid Programming in HPC

Most HPC systems are clusters of shared memory nodes. To use such systems efficiently both memory consumption and communication time has to be optimized. Therefore, hybrid programming may combine the distributed memory parallelization on the node interconnect (e.g., with MPI) with the shared memory parallelization inside of each node (e.g., with OpenMP or MPI-3.0 shared memory). This course analyzes the strengths and weaknesses of several parallel programming models on clusters of SMP nodes. Multi-socket-multi-core systems in highly parallel environments are given special consideration. MPI-3.0 has introduced a new shared memory programming interface, which can be combined with inter-node MPI communication. It can be used for direct neighbor accesses similar to OpenMP or for direct halo copies, and enables new hybrid programming models. These models are compared with various hybrid MPI+OpenMP approaches and pure MPI. Numerous case studies and micro-benchmarks demonstrate the performance-related aspects of hybrid programming.

Hands-on sessions are included on all days. Tools for hybrid programming such as thread/process placement support and performance analysis are presented in a "how-to" section. This course provides scientific training in Computational Science and, in addition, the scientific exchange of the participants among themselves.

Content Levels: Beginners = 0:00h (0%) + Intermediate = 1:30h (10%) + Advanced = 13:30h (90%)

This course is a PRACE training event. It is organized by the VSC Research Center, TU Wien, in cooperation with HLRS and RRZE.