Software and Hardware Testbeds used in the course
Hardware
A Beowulf cluster named
Valkyrie is our main compute platform. Valkyrie operates using the the
Rocks system developed at the
San Diego Supercomputer Center and runs the
Linux Operating system.
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.
Click
HERE for a list of documentation and tutorials for MPI.
PPF - Parallel Print facility NEW
PPF
is the Ptools consortium parallel print facility.
The library has been installed in valkyrie:$(PUB)/lib/PPF,
with examples in $(PUB)/examples/PPF. See the README
file for further instructions.
SPRNG random number generator
Use SPRNG for generating random numbers.
It is specially designed to run on parallel processors.
See the documentation
Intel Math Kernel library (MKL)
The Intel Math Kernel Library (MKL) provides high performance
implementations of common numerical functions like
Matrix Multiplication and the FFT.
To link with MKL use the following on your load line
${MKLPATH}/libmkl_lapack.a ${MKLPATH}/libmkl_ia32.a ${MKLPATH}/libguide.a -lpthread
where ${MKLPATH} has been set as follows (i.e.
in your .bashrc file):
export MKLPATH=/opt/intel/mkl61/lib/32
If you want to use the FFT or DFT, add -lm to your link
line.
Documentation can be found at
http://developer.intel.com/software/products/mkl/docs/mklqref/index.htm
.
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 13 is
available on CSE Dept Suns in /opt/matlab-6.5r13/bin. You may also purchase the Student
version of Matlab, complete with user's guide.
Python
Python is a scripting language that supports rapid prototyping. It is accessible on department APE lab Suns.
Threads (Pthreads)
Threads are used for shared memory programming. One popular
interface is Pthreads. Click Here
for more information.
Gnuplot
Gnuplot is a publicly available plotting program.
For documentation, see
http://www.duke.edu/~hpgavin/gnuplot.html
Maintained by
.
Last
modified:
Wed Sep 14 18:42:17 PDT 2005