BlueFern

Bluefern™

High Performance Computing Courses

Three High Performance Computing (HPC) courses, ENGR684, ENGR685 and ENGR686 will be offered by BlueFern and Engineering at the University of Canterbury in 2013. These courses are designed not only for postgraduate students who are interested in HPC, but also for students who wish to use HPC in their scientific research such as molecular biology, computational fluid dynamics, bioinformatics and applied mathematics etc and to solve complex problems that can't be solved by using a single desktop or workstation computer.

Student who wish to participate in any of all of the following courses should normally have a degree in Science with Honours, Engineering or be in the final year of one of these degrees.

For more information about these HPC courses and their schedules please contact bluefern@canterbury.ac.nz.

ENGR684

Special Topic: Parallel Computing Architectures

Semester 1, 22 April - 24 April 2013
Otakaro 217 Computer Lab

This three day long course provides students with an understanding of different type of parallel computer architectures that are currently used in computational sciences and engineering disciplines to solve complex problems. In addition it also provides the student with an introduction to Grid Computing, a phenomenon becoming more widely used in Scientific Computing.

Prerequisites: none


ENGR685


Special Topic: Structured Programming for Scientific Computing

Semester 1, 20 May - 24 May 2013
Otakaro 217 Computer Lab (changed from Otakaro 232)

Many applications, such as MATLAB, are used at a graduate level to solve scientific problems. The disadvantage of this is students, who go on to make use of High Performance Computing, may not have the necessary skills and experiences in developing their own programs or modifying existing scientific applications.

This one week course provides the student, through lectures, tutorials and assessments, with the ability to write structured code, using the C programming language and scientific libraries to solve mathematical problems. An introduction to data representation, compilers, linkers and debugging programs will also be covered using a UNIX/LINUX supercomputing environment.

Prerequisites: none


ENGR686


Special Topic: Parallel Programming using the Message Passing Interface

Semester 2, 5 August - 9 August 2013
Otakaro 205 Computer Lab (Otakaro annex)

Most of the applications used by the majority of the world's supercomputers are parallelised by using the Message Passing Interface (MPI). The MPI standard defines a core library of software routines to assist in turning serial applications into parallel ones that can be run on a shared or distributed memory system.

This one week course provides students, through lectures, tutorials and assessments the skills required to write parallel programs using this programming model, and is directly applicable to almost every parallel computer architecture.

Prerequisites:

  • ENGR685 Special Topic - Structured Programming for Scientific Computing
    or recommended preparation
  • Experience of a High Performance Computing environment and programming language such as C/C++ or FORTRAN