Advanced Parallel Programming with MPI and OpenMP

The focus is on advanced programming with MPI and OpenMP. The course addresses participants who have already some experience with C/C++, Fortran or Python and MPI and OpenMP, the most popular programming models in high performance computing (HPC).

The course will teach newest methods in MPI-3.0/3.1/4.0/4.1 and OpenMP-4.5 and 5.0, which were developed for the efficient use of current HPC hardware. Topics with MPI are the group and communicator concept, process topologies, derived data types, the new MPI-3.0 Fortran language binding, one-sided communication and the shared memory programming model within MPI. Topics with OpenMP are the OpenMP-4.0/4.5/5.0 extensions, as the vectorization directives, thread affinity and OpenMP places. (The GPU programming with OpenMP directives is not part of this course.) The course also contains performance and best practice considerations.

Hands-on sessions (in C, Fortran and Python+mpi4py+numpy) will allow users to immediately test and understand the basic constructs of the Message Passing Interface (MPI) and the shared memory directives of OpenMP (in C and Fortran).

This course provides scientific training in Computational Science, and in addition, the scientific exchange of the participants among themselves. It is organized by JSC in cooperation with HLRS.

Location

Online course
Organizer: JSC Forschungszentrum Jülich, Germany

Registration

Start date

Dec 01, 2025
08:45

End date

Dec 04, 2025
16:15

Language

English

Entry level

Intermediate

Course subject areas

Parallel Programming

Topics

MPI

OpenMP

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Prerequisites and content levels

Prerequisites

Unix / C or Fortran / familiar with the principles of MPI, e.g., to the extent of the introductory course MPI and OpenMP, i.e., at least the MPI process model, blocking point-to-point message passing and collective communication, and the single program concept of parallelizing applications, and for the afternoon session of the last day, to be familiar with OpenMP 3.0.

To be able to do the hands-on exercises of this course, you need a computer with an OpenMP capable C/C++ or Fortran compiler and a corresponding, up-to-date MPI library (in case of Fortran, the mpi_f08 module is required). Please note that the course organizers will not grant you access to an HPC system nor any other compute environment. Therefore, please make sure to have a functioning working environment / access to an HPC cluster prior to the course.

In addition, you can perform the MPI exercises in Python with mpi4py + numpy. In this case, an appropriate installation on your system is required (together with a C/C++ or Fortran installation for the OpenMP exercises).

Please
tar -xvzf TEST.tar.gz
using https://fs.hlrs.de/projects/par/events/TEST.tar.gz or
unzip TEST.zip using https://fs.hlrs.de/projects/par/events/TEST.zip
and verify your MPI and OpenMP installation with the tests described in TEST/README.txt within the archive.

The exercise about race-condition detection (at the end of the course) is optional. It would require an installation of a race condition detection tool, e.g., the Intel Inspector (available until 2024) together with the Intel compiler, or Intel compilers 2024 or 2025 which include the ThreadSanitizer, or both. It is recommended to install it.