More than one hundred people successfully participated in a two-day MPI workshop held at OSC over the Access Grid on March 28-29.
Leslie Southern, OSC Science and Technology Support Lead, stated that, "This Access Grid event was like no other I've ever witness. We demonstrated how well this technology performs with interested participants and a dedicated instructor."
In the MPI workshop, OSC Senior Supercomputer Resource Specialist Dr. 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."
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 Urbana-Champaign (UIUC) 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."
Satellite locations for the MPI course included the following: OSC, Albuquerque High Performance Computing Center, Boston University, Dartmouth, University of Kansas, NCSA, North Dakota State University, and University of Kentucky.
To learn more about the Access Grid, see http://www.mcs.anl.gov/accessgrid. This MPI workshop was sponsored by the Alliance Partners for Advanced Computational Services
(PACS).
About OSC
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.
