Parallel programming

[Mark Lane]

William O'Higgins Witteman wrote:
> Does anyone have experience or can recommend a good resource for
> high-performance parallel programming?
>
> Specifically, I have been asked to help one of my colleagues parallelize
> a simulation.  Ideally I would like to be able to run it on many, many
> Linux machines via Amazon Web Services or similar service, but it would
> be great to maximize an arbitrary number of cores as well as
> physical/virtual machines.  Thanks.
>   
I used to sell Beowulf clusters so I know a bit about parallel 
processing. Most work in parallelization is done in either Fortran or 
C/C++ with special parallel compilers, libraries and APIs. Here's some 
links.

http://openmp.org/wp/
http://www.mhpcc.edu/training/workshop/parallel_libs/MAIN.html
http://software.intel.com/en-us/intel-compilers/
http://www.pgroup.com/
http://www.hpcwire.com/features/Compilers_and_More_Parallel_Programming_Made_Easy.html

Now I am sure Grid programming is a bit of a different duck because of 
the high latency involved with message passing so mpich and the like are 
probably not used as much unless the grid is made up of  Beowulf 
Clusters in different locations.

BTW I looked at Amazon Web Services and I noticed nothing about grid 
computing on the site. Just stuff about distributed websites and 
load-balancing. It's basically for doing distributed web apps.

You might be better of with a service like this.

http://www.tsunamictechnologies.com/services.htm

They give you access to a beowulf cluster from the web to run parallel 
code on. No need to worry about the low-latency of a grid. They may even 
have the parallel compilers for you to use on their cluster.

You might also want to contact some of the local Universities to see if 
they sell processing time on their beowulf clusters. Certainly talking 
with someone who works with clustering in an Academic setting will be 
help even if they don't as they can help you a lot more than I can. 
Especially with the Grid stuff.

--
Mark Lane
lmlane-Re5JQEeQqe8AvxtiuMwx3w at public.gmane.org




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