Successful Farber SC14 Tutorial "From 'Hello World' to ExaScale Computing Using x86, GPUs and Intel Xeon Phi Coprocessors"

The Rob Farber SC14 tutorial “From ‘Hello World’ to Exascale Using x86, GPUs and Intel Xeon Phi Coprocessors” (tut106s1) went smoothly and was highly successful. The requests we received from our students at the tutorial to teach this, or a similar class in the US and around the world from the UK to India are a clear measure of our success. In particular, ours is the only class to teach and compare both GPUs and Intel Xeon Phi coprocessors. In addition, my MSI WS60 mobile workstation performed flawlessly.

Rob Farber teaching at his SC14 tutorail

Rob Farber teaching his SC14 tutorial using an MSI WS60 Mobile Workstation that can run GPU codes on the internal Quadro K2100M

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We had nearly 3x the expected number of attendees, which raised concerns if the Internet and local computing resources were able to support the needs of over 80 interactive users all concurrently compiling and running hands-on tutorial codes. Happily the teams at TACC and CreativeC made everything run smoothly. In particular, the three node CreativeC machine (containing 3 NVIDIA K40c GPUs and an Intel Xeon Phi Coprocessor per compute node) supported a load of over 60 concurrent users throughout the all-day tutorial where each student was actively compiling and running interactive tasks. (Click here to read about this system running mobile in a van on the way to SC14.) Not bad for a system that starts at $12k!

CreativeC Stella compute cluster running in a van while being transported to SC14

James Reinders (Director, Chief Evangelist, Intel Software, Intel Corporation, Portland, OR, USA) stopped by to speak briefly to the class and give away a few free copies of High Performance Parallelism Pearls.

James Reinders (Director, Chief Evangelist, Intel Software, Intel Corporation, Portland, OR, USA) with Rob Farber

James Reinders and Rob Farber at SC14

Special thanks to Greg Stantlen, Andree Jacobson, and Tim Thomas from CreativeC plus Jason Allison and Paul Navratil at TACC. This work used the Extreme Science and Engineering Discovery Environment (XSEDE), which is supported by National Science Foundation grant number ACI-1053575.