The Message Passing Interface (MPI) is a standardized library specification for message passing between different processes. In layman's terms: MPI provides mechanisms for handling the data communication in a parallel program. It is particularly suited for computational clusters, where the workstations are connected by an interconnection network (e.g. Infiniband, Gigabit Ethernet).
In this workshop, the applicability of MPI will be compared to other parallel programming paradigms such as OpenMP, Cuda and MapReduce. Next, the basic principles of MPI will be gradually introduced (Point-to-point communication, collective communication, MPI datatypes, etc). Hands-on exercises allow the participants to immediately turn the newly acquired skills into practice. Finally, some more theoretical considerations regarding scalability of algorithms are presented.
About the lecturer: Dr. Jan Fostier. Jan received his MS and PhD degree in physical engineering from Ghent University in 2005 and 2009 respectively. Currently, he is appointed assistant professor in the department of Information Technology (INTEC) at the same university. His main research interests are (parallel) algorithms for biological sciences, high performance computing and computational electromagnetics.