Parallel Computing Workshop, Day 1

The workshop format is lecture / lab, all in the lab, which suits Southern Man just fine. The workstations are single-monitor but are large enough for comfort. The supercomputer operating system is Red Hat Linux (yes, this world-class machine runs a freeware OS and a bunch of open-source or otherwise-free compilers; the academic-priced Windows 7 licenses on the lab workstations probably cost more than all of the software running on the big iron) so Southern Man has bowed to tradition and is doing all of his editing in vi. Today were tutorials on MPI and OpenMP, the first delivered at a frantic rate (by the workshop coordinator and general master of the supercomputer) and the second at a more leisurely pace by a graduate student. The languages used are Fortran and C, both of which Southern Man learned early in the game but are rarely seen today. Most of the participants are happily forging code in the latter language while the few Fortran holdouts huddle in the back of the room wondering just what sort of hell they have fallen in to. malloc() and pointers and NULL, oh my!

And then Southern Man came home - and sat in front of the computer. What?