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Feature Story | Mathematics and Computer Science

MPI tutorial at Argonne a resounding success

Almost 200 people attended the full day of tutorials on the Message Passing Interface on June 6, 2014, held at the Theory and Computing Sciences center at Argonne National Laboratory.

Participants came not only from local universities – Northwestern, the University of Chicago, Northern Illinois University, the University of Illinois at Chicago, Loyola University, and the Illinois Institute of Technology — but also from the University of Iowa and Cornell. Also attending were people from industry, including VasSol, Inc., and Ziena Optimization LLC.

The morning session of the tutorial provided an overview of MPI — the de facto standard for parallel programming. The participants were introduced to the benefits of MPI and the capabilities of various MPI implementations. This session also covered the basics of writing a simple MPI program including code examples and real-world use cases.

The afternoon session provided an advanced-level tutorial focusing on powerful techniques including one-sided memory, hybrid MPI programming, and neighborhood collectives. This session included code examples demonstrating the use of all techniques. Also discussed was the future direction of MPI and what might be incorporated in the near future.

Presenters included Pavan Balaji, Rajeev Thakur, Ken Raffenetti, and Wesley Bland of Argonne and Xin Zhao of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and research intern at Argonne.

The workshop was supported by the Mathematics and Computer Science Division at Argonne National Laboratory and presented by the Programming Models and Runtime Systems Group led by Pavan Balaji.