Sun HPC ClusterTools 7.1 is now available!

Sun HPC ClusterTools 7.1 is an update release based on Open MPI 1.2.4. Included in Sun HPC ClusterTools 7.1 are Intel 32- and 64-bit support, improved parallel debugger support, PBS Pro validation, improved memory usage for communication, and other bug fixes by the Open MPI community since Open MPI 1.2 was first released.

Sun HPC ClusterTools 7.1 software supports:

Download from http://www.sun.com/software/products/clustertools/index.xml 

Open MPI is the open source version of the MPI parallel programming API.
» Learn more about Open MPI

Wilkinson and Allen's PARALLEL PROGRAMMING was published in 1999 (Prentice Hall). A revised edition came out in 2005. And I finally got my hands on it.

It IS expensive.  Maybe you can now find used copies (be sure it's the 2nd edition!)

Used as a computer science text, it is a complete course on parallel programming techniques and algorithms, and covers MPI, Pthreads, and MPI. The new material covers distributed shared memory systems (DSM).

And, as a course, it is rich with examples and end-of-chapter homework problems. Some of them are really creative, like: "Write a multithreaded program to simulate two automatic teller machines being accessed by different persons on a single shared account."

Some of the typical parallel applications explored are image processing, numerical algorithms, and sorting and searching techniques. 

I went thru the first edition (minus the problems) when it first came out. Now this expanded revised edition has me totally entranced, again.  This is a great book, and I highly recommend it to anyone thinking seriously about parallel programming, especially for technical computing applications.

Clearly, multithreaded or parallel programming is growing in importance as the new chip architectures move towards multiple cores and multiple threads rather than merely upping clock cycle times.

But parallel programming is hard, no doubt about it. It's so much easier to cast a computational problem into a serial, one-step-at-a-time framework than think of it in terms of data distribution over networks of compute nodes.

So how do you learn parallel programming?

Luckily there are a number of resources on the web. Here are just a few links

• Lawrence Livermore National Lab has an extensive set of online tutorials and training material.
  http://www.llnl.gov/computing/hpc/training/index.shtml
• Introduction to Parallel Computing
• MPI Tutorial
• OpenMP
• Posix Threads Programming
• NERSC Tutorials
• Ian Foster's Designing and Building Parallel Programs (an online book and tutorial, still useful even tho it's now 12 years old)
• NCSA HPC Training Courses - requires (free) registration and login, has detailed online courses on OpenMP, MPI, parallel programming concepts, and combined shared/distributed memory parallelization.