NCSA NEWS

OSC Hosts Successful MPI Course Over Access Grid

released April 10, 2001

 

Contact
Kathryn Kelley
Ohio Supercomputer Center
kkelley@osc.edu
614.292.6067

COLUMBUS, OH — More than one hundred people successfully participated in a two-day Message Passing Interface (MPI) workshop held at OSC over the Access Grid on March 28-29.

Leslie Southern, OSC science and technology support lead, stated, "This Access Grid event was like no other I've ever witnessed. We demonstrated how well this technology performs with interested participants and a dedicated instructor."

In the MPI workshop, OSC Senior Supercomputer Resource Specialist Dave Ennis covered message-passing fundamentals, MPI program structure, MPI messages and datatypes, point-to-point communication, non-blocking communication, derived datatypes, collective communication, and virtual topologies.

"As a teacher, I think about the students. This workshop was the first time I really felt like I was right there in the classroom with the students," said Ennis. "My support was the large number of questions and extended discussions I had with students in classrooms across the country."

The workshop was sponsored by the National Computational Science Alliance's Partners for Advanced Computational Services (PACS). OSC is a PACS site. Joining the participants at OSC were those who attended via Access Grid nodes at seven sites: Albuquerque High Performance Computing Center, Boston University, Dartmouth College, University of Kansas, the National Center for Supercomputing Applications, North Dakota State University, and University of Kentucky. Each of the satellite location participants commented on how easy it was to collaborate with the instructor and attendees. This experience produced a unique and highly beneficial educational environment.

Thomas Maiden from Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center (PSC) attended the OSC workshop at OSC and said, "The course was very well done from the application/admission process, to the instruction and technical support of the Access Grid. Excellent job."

Others shared in his enthusiasm. NCSA satellite attendee Andreas Haselbacher of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign said, "Overall, I liked it a lot and found it useful to extend and deepen my knowledge of MPI. I am impressed with the Access Grid."

The Access Grid is an integrated environment that supports distributed meetings, remote visualization, and distance education. Alliance partner Argonne National Laboratory leads the Access Grid development and deployment effort. To learn more about the Access Grid, see http://www.mcs.anl.gov/accessgrid/.

OSC is Ohio's flagship center for high performance computing (HPC), networking, educational outreach, and information technology. OSC empowers our academic, industrial, and government partners to make Ohio the education and technology state of the future.

 

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