Why a hybrid MPI/OpenMP programming strategy?

This year, Moore’s Law turned 50. The law, formulated by Gordon E. Moore, co-founder of Intel, suggests that “The number of transistors incorporated in a chip will approximately double every 24 months”. Until now, the law has always been validated. But, since few years, depsite the fact that the law is still valid, the processors wall-clock frequency seems to stagnate, and the law reaching a limit, mainly due to prohibitive electrical consumption.

Install PGI Fortran Compilers on Linux & Mac OS X

Yet another Fortran compiler?

Honestly, I think that, whether you do have your favorite Fortran compiler or not, it is always interesting to check how your applications behave to different compilers.

After the GNU and the Intel Fortran compilers, we will describe here how to install the PGI Fortran compiler on Linux Ubuntu 12.04 LTS. The PGI Fortran compiler is also available for Mac OS X, and a link to download and install it is provided here.

Which MPI Implementation?

Which MPI implementation to choose? Which one is better? Which one is more suitable for my application? What is the difference between MPICH, Intel MPI and OpenMPI?

Who didn’t ask one of these questions, at least when he / she first started using or developing programs on HPC systems?

Install Version Control using Subversion on Linux

Subversion is a Free/Open-source Version Control System (VCS). That is, Subversion manages files and directories, and the changes made to them, over time. This allows you to recover older versions of your data or examine the history of how your data changed. It can operate across networks, which allows it to be used by people on different computers.

In this tutorial, we aim at installing Subversion on a Linux Ubuntu system and configuring it to run across a network using an Apache Web Server configuration.

Install MPICH On Linux

In a previous post, we have detailed how to install OpenMPI on a Mac OS X system. At that time, it seemed alot easier to setup the OpenMPI implementation on a Mac system, rather that MPICH.

In this post, we will try to describe how to setup MPICH on a Linux system.

First, if not done yet, please consider installing the libc-dev package, which contains headers for developers from the Linux kernel: