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CERN |
This season has seen two instances
of technical workshops organized by CERN openlab. On November
11th and 12th a fourth edition of the successful Multi-Threading
and Parallelism Workshop was held. The 25 participants were
taught by a visiting compiler expert from Intel,
Jeff Arnold, as well
as two openlab staff:
Sverre Jarp and
Andrzej Nowak. Sverre described the changes in the computing
landscape and highlighted the need for parallelism in modern
software, as well as introduced the participants to the world of
parallel programming. Jeff explained how Intel-related
technologies work in the parallel domain, most notably the open
source Threading Building Blocks (TBB), but also Intel Threading
Tools. Andrzej dove a little bit deeper into parallel
programming paradigms and described the implications of some new
exciting technologies ahead of us, such as Hyper Threading,
Intel AVX and Intel Ct. There were also two half-day long
hands-on labs, where the attendees could familiarize themselves
with all discussed technologies, and see how they perform in
practice – be it POSIX threads, OpenMP or TBB.
CERN openlab has also expanded its teaching portfolio by another
class, also destined to be held in regular 5-6-month intervals.
Tried and tested at the CERN School of Computing 2008 and
earlier at CERN, the first official edition of the Computer
Architecture and Performance Tuning Workshop gathered about 20
participants, both from CERN and from external collaborating
laboratories. Two openlab staff, Sverre Jarp and Andrzej Nowak, explained to the
attendees the most crucial aspects of modern computer
architecture, and gave general advice relating to performance
monitoring and tuning. A half-day of hands-on labs was held,
where perfmon2, the tool bound to become the standard
performance monitoring interface in the Linux kernel, was used
to demonstrate monitoring and optimization techniques.
More workshops of both kinds will
be organized in Spring 2009.
Andrzej Nowak
CERN
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