ORNL Introduces Supercomputing to Summer Students
Jun 30th, 2008
NCCS seminar explains basics
NCCS’s Arnold Tharrington, instructs students in the basics of supercomputing.
The NCCS recently hosted a "Supercomputing Crash Course" to familiarize summer students with the science of high-performance computing.
Approximately 60 students and faculty members attended two workshops, hosted by NCCS staff members Arnold Tharrington and Rebecca Hartmann-Baker. The workshops aimed both to educate the summer students already involved in computational science and to gauge the interests of students who are new to supercomputing.
An overview of the UNIX operating system was a major theme of the workshops, as they were aimed at students with little to no UNIX experience. The instructors also briefly discussed MPI, demonstrating simple MPI programs on the NCCS’s 263-teraflop Jaguar supercomputer, one of the world’s premier high-performance computing systems.
"The main objective [of the MPI workshop] was to get the students to understand the MPI programming model," said Tharrington. "It was a great experience for both the students and the instructors," added Hartmann-Baker. "I look forward to conducting similar workshops in the future."
