Testbeds for the Course

Software and Hardware Testbeds used in the course

Hardware

ACS'S Valkyrie Cluster. Our main compute platform, running the Rocks system developed at the San Diego Supercomputer Center. Valkyrie consists of 16 dual 1Ghz Pentium III CPUs. Each node has 1GB of RAM, and a Myrinet switch provides low latency connectivity between the nodes. There is a web page telling you more about Valkyrie's CPUs.

Here are some notes to help you get started with Valkyrie.

Software

The following software tools will be available in the course

MPI. The Message Passing Interface (MPI) was developed by committee, packaged as a subroutine library, and is standard fare these days. See

Draft version of Peter Pacheco's book ps
Introduction to MPI (adapted from Larry Carter and Kathy Yelick's classes) ppt and pdf.
MPI Man pages
MPI for C Programmers(TACC)
MPI: The Complete Reference, first Ed. by Marc Snir, Steve Otto, Steven Huss-Lederman, David Walker, and Jack Dongarra. In-depth treatment of MPI. The most recent (second) edition is available in hard-copy only.
MPI Tutorials:
- http://www.mcs.anl.gov/Projects/mpi/learning.html
- MPI Tutorial Exercises
MPI Home Page: http://www.mcs.anl.gov/Projects/mpi/

Intel Math Kernel library (MKL). This high performance library provides many useful mathemaics functions including BLAS, FFT, etc. MKL can significantly boost the performance over hand coding by an order of magnitude or more. MKL is installed on valkyrie in /usr/local/intel/mkl.

To use the MKL math library, be sure and add the following to your compilation line for any module that makes a call to MKL:

-I/usr/local/intel/mkl/INCLUDE

and be sure to add the following to your loader line:

-L/usr/local/intel/mkl/LIB -lmkl32_def -lpthread

Matlab

Matlab is a handy problem solving environment and scientific programming language. It supports rapid prototyping and a useful plotting capability. A large collection of Matlab scripts are available for diverse application domains; see the Mathworks web site at http://www.mathworks.com for an archive. Matlab Release 12 is available on CSE Dept Suns. You may also purchase the Student version of Matlab, complete with user's guide.

Matlab's on-line help desk.
Matlab Online Reference
Image processing toolkit
Matlab Primer ps
Extensive on-line documentation located on CSE systems in subdirectories of /net/cs/license/matlab_r12/help/pdf_doc.

Python

Python is a scripting language that supports rapid prototyping. It is accessible on department APE lab Suns.

Download Python from the Python web site at www.python.org
Python documentation from SourceForge.

Threads (Pthreads)

Threads are used for shared memory programming. One popular interface is Pthreads. Click Here for more information.

Software and Hardware Testbeds used in the course

Hardware

Software

Matlab

Maintained by Scott B. Baden. Last modified: 15 February 2001 08:59 PM