LECTURE: Computational Building Blocks: Software

Overview

Teaching: 30 min
Exercises: 0 min

Questions

• What is an operating system (OS)?

• What OSs do HPC facilities use?

• What are processes?

• What are threads?

• How are processes and threads relevant to parallel computing?

Objectives

• Understanding the software behind HPC systems.

• Learning what these components are used for.

Slides

This part of the course will be delivered using a slide presentation. You can find the slides for this here.

Key Points

• Most HPC systems run UNIX or Linux as an OS.

• Each application is a seperate process; the OS will schedule any process.

• Threads are sub-processes that compose a process.