23/02/2016 Course introduction, MPI basic concepts Parallel programming frameworks and high-level approach to parallel programming over different platforms: MPI, TBB and OpenCL as main examples; course organization and prerequisites; reference books and studying material. MPI (Message Passing Interface) standard : brief history and aim of the standard, single program / multiple data execution model, compilation and linkage model; issues in supporting multiple programming languages and uses (application, utility library and programming language support) with a static compilation and linkage approach. Portability in parallel programming: functional and non-functional aspects, performance tuning and performance debugging. MPI as a parallel framework that supports a structured approach to parallel programming. Basic concepts of MPI: communicators (definition, purpose, difference between inter and intra-communicators, process ranks);

24/02/2016 MPI basic concepts : communicators (definition, purpose, difference between inter and intra-communicators, process ranks); point to point communication (concepts of envelope, local/global completion, blocking/non-blocking primitive, send modes); collective communications (definition, communication scope, global serialization, freedom of implementation in the standard); MPI datatypes (basic meaning and use, primitive / derived datatypes, relationship with sequential language types).

01/03/2016 MPI : MPI library initialization and basic MPI usage; point to point communication semantics (buffer behaviour, receive, wildcards, status objects, MPI_PROC_NULL), basic and derived MPI datatypes (purpose as explicitly defined meta-data provided to the MPI implementation, multiple language bindings, code-instantiated metadata, examples).

02/03/2016 MPI : MPI datatypes (semantics, typemap and type signature, matching rules for communication, role in MPI-performed packing and unpacking); core primitives for datatype creation (MPI_Type_* : contiguous, vector, hvector, indexed, hindexed, struct, commit, free) and examples.

09/03/2016 MPI : point to point communication modes (MPI_BSEND, MPI_SSEND; MPI_RSend usage); non-blocking communication (Wait and Test group of primitives, semantics, MPI_Request object handles to active requests); canceling and testing cancellation of non-blocking primitives (issues and pitfalls, interaction with MPI implementation, e.g. MPI_finalize); communicators and groups (communicator design aim and programming abstraction, local and global information, attributes and virtual topologies, groups as local objects, primitives for locally creating and managing groups); intracommunicators (basic primitives concerning size, rank, comparison); communicator creation as a collective operation, MPI_Comm_create basic and general case.

11/03/2016 MPI LAB Writing structured MPI programs, point to point communications (ping pong, token ring and variants) and how to write reusable code by exploiting communicators.

16/03/2016 MPI MPI_Comm_split; collective communications (definition and semantics, execution environment, basic features, agreement of key parameters among the processes, constraints on Datatypes and typemaps for collective op.s, overall serialization vs synchronization, potential deadlocks); taxonomy of MPI collectives (blocking/non-blocking, synchronization/communication/communication+computation, asymmetry of the communication pattern, variable size versions, all- versions); MPI_IN_PLACE and collective op.s.; basic blocking collective operations (barrier, broadcast, gather/gatherV, scatter/scatterV, allgather, alltoall/alltoallv).

18/03/2016 MPI LAB Examples with derived datatypes (indexed, vector and their combinations).

23/03/2016 MPI Composing Datatypes, derived datatypes memory layout: explicitly setting and getting extent; Compute and communication collectives, MPI_Reduce, semantics; MPI Operators (arithmetic, logic, bitwise, MINLOC and MAXLOC) and their interaction with Datatypes; defining MPI custom operators via MPI_Create_op.

06/04/2016 MPI LAB Design and implementation of a simple farm skeleton in MPI. Reusability and separation of concerns in MPI: exploiting communicators for skeleton and inside skeleton implementation; simple and muliple buffering; different communication primitives (Synch/Buffered and Blocking/non blocking) wrt farm load distributions strategies: Round Robin, Job request, implicit job request with double buffering.

08/04/2016 TBB (Thread Building Blocks) TBB C++ template library overview: purpose, abstraction mechanisms and implementation layers (templates, runtime, supported abstractions, use of C++ concepts); tasks vs threads and parallel patterns hierarchical composability; parallel_for, ranges and partitioners; task partitioning and scheduling, grain size and affinity; quick note on the use of lambda expression, containers and mutexes.

13/04/2016 TBB TBB basic C++ concepts and algorithms (i.e. parallel skeletons). Binary splittables, range concept and blocked ranges, proportional split; parallel_for_each, parallel for; passing arguments to parallel algorithms (lamba functions vs body classes), optional arguments; parallel for 1D simplified syntax; partitioners.

15/04/2016 Lesson postponed

20/04/2016 Lesson postponed

22/04/2016 TBB reduce (differences between “functional” and “imperative” forms); deterministic reduce; pipeline class and filter class (i.e. stages), strongly typed parallel_pipeline and make_filter template. TBB containers: similarity and differences with STL containers, mutithreaded/sequential performance tradeoffs wrt software lockout, space and time overheads, relaxed/restricted semantics and feature drops, thread view consistency; container_range, extending containers to ranges, concurrent map and set templates: concurrent_hash, unordered, unordered_multi map; concurrent and unordered set.

27/04/2016 TBB Containers: concurrent queue, bounded_queue, priority queue; concurrent vector; thread local storage; C+11 style atomics.

29/04/2016 MPI Lab (3 hours) Mandelbrot set computation in MPI: farm optimization and tuning.

04/05/2016 OpenCL introduction GPGPU and OpenCL. Development history of modern GPUs, graphic pipeline, HW/FW implementations, load unbalance related to the distribution of graphic primitives executed, more “general purpose” and programmable core design; generic constraints and optimizations of the GPU approach; modern GPU architecture, memory optimization and constraints, memory spaces. GPGPU, and transition to explicitly general purpose programming languages for GPU. OpenCL intro and examples: framework goal (portability, widespdread adoption), design concepts and programming abstractions (Devices/host interaction, kernels, queues).

06/05/2016 TBB Lab (3 hours) TBB Lab exercises Farm-like implementation of the Mandelbrot set computation with TBB. Simple farm implementation, granularity and load balance with a high variance load; farm with partial computation and recycling of task continuation, extension to divide and conquer.

09/05/2016 OpenCL design concepts and programming abstractions: Devices/host interaction, context, kernel, command queues; execution model; memory spaces in OpenCL; C/C++ subset for kernels, kernel compilation, program objects, memory objects and kernel arguments, execution, kernel instances and workgroups, workgroup synchronization; portability and chances for load balancing: mapping OpenCL code onto both the GPU and the CPU; examples of vector types and vector operations; basic example of OpenCL program construction.

11/05/2016 moved to 09/05/2016

13/05/2016 OpenCL (3 hours) Writing, benchmark, analysis and optimization of an OpenCL program performing matrix multiplication: different approaches to data and control-flow decomposition and mapping intermediate results to different memory spaces (private/local/global memory and host memory), comparison with an equivalent CPU program; creating a trivial kernel with initialization and host code, choosing the data decomposition strategy (1D vs 2D) and its parameters; reduce pattern in OpenCL: work-item synchronization for parallel reduction, choosing a different computation pattern to reduce synchronizations (barriers).

18/05/2016 OpenCL OpenCL event generation and handling (event barriers) for inter-queue, non local synchronization. OpenCL 2.0 and 2.1 features: shared virtual memory (GPU/CPU memory space overlaying); nested kernels and recursive parallelism without host/device interaction; generic address space as a tool to avoid source code duplication; C11 atomics in OpenCL 2.0; pipes.

20/05/2016 (3 hours) MPI / TBB Lab time MPI / TBB implementation of the K-means clustering algorithm.

20/05/2016 (1 hours) OpenCL OpenCL 2.1: moving towards the use of a proper subset of C++14 for kernels (e.g. templates, overloading, lambda f.), allowing single-source OpenCL and non-OpenCL programming (SYCL) and providing a more homogeneous and organized semantics. The SPIR-V interoperable, symbolic GPU machine code representation and its use in the LLVM based development toolset; semplification and restructuring of the OpenCL support and its evolution with the introduction of the Vulkan layer.

23/05/2016 Project discussion