Introduction to Parallel Computing

Universität Kassel - Wintersemester 2011/2012

Matthias K. Gobbert - University of Maryland, Baltimore County


This page can be reached via the Teaching area of my homepage at http://www.math.umbc.edu/~gobbert.

Basic Information


Course Description

This course will be followed by the course Parallel Computing for Partial Differential Equations and the seminar Applications of Parallel Computing in Sommersemester 2012.

Parallel computing has become an almost ubiquitous way to perform computer simulations involving large amounts of data or intensive calculations. The basic purpose of using several processors is to speed up computations of large problems by distributing the work. But large problems typically involve vast quantities of data as well; by distributing the data across several processors, problems of previously unsolvable size can now be tackled in reasonable time.

This course will both introduce the basic aspects of parallel programming and the algorithmic considerations involved in designed scalable parallel numerical methods. The programming will use MPI (Message Passing Interface), the most common library of parallel communication commands today for any type of parallel machine architecture. We will discuss several application examples in detail that show how parallel computing can be used to solve large application problems in practice.

Registered students in this course will gain access to the cluster computing resources of the IT Servicezentrum at the Universität Kassel.

The class will include an efficient introduction to the Linux operating system as installed on the cluster being used, and it will include a review of serial programming in the source code language C that is integrated into the initial presentation of sample codes. This review assumes some experience with compiling and debugging in a high-level source code programming language. It will only include a restricted set of features of C, but these are selected to be sufficient for work on the homework assignments in the class.


Learning Goals

By the end of this course, you should:

Other Information


Copyright © 2001-2012 by Matthias K. Gobbert. All Rights Reserved.
This page version 3.0, April 2012. Updated link to summary area 05/22/14 MGo.