[H-GEN] Linux and high-performance computing

[Russell Stuart]

On Mon, 2015-08-31 at 21:55 +0100, Benjamin Fowler wrote:
> Does anybody have any suggestions on how I might get familiar with
> modern high-performance computing architectures? 

I know very little about scientific computing architectures, but I can
tell you one thing - there has been a revolution in scientific
computing, and it wasn't driven by the big iron you are referring to.

It has been driven by GPU's.  It's entirely because of cost.  You can
purchase a GPU and put it to work for, well nothing really because
modern CPU's have them built in.  At the higher end a couple of $K will
get you 1000 cores with more internal bandwidth than the big iron could
have dreamt about a decade ago.

Teaching yourself to program GPU's isn't hard - there are lots of
tutorials on the web.  I can't recommend any - so just google it.

Also there have been several talks at recent LCA's on the subject.  Here
are a couple:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RhwJUdmwDGU
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PUWfl92sqjY