Course Materials by Subject of CPS-615, Introduction to Computational Science, Fall 1997

Synopsis of the course

This is a new version of the CPS615 course materials, replacing those from Fall 1996. The course is being taught by Professor Geoffrey Fox in Fall 1997, and the materials will be updated during the semester.

Introduction to High Performance Computing (HPC) and Compuational Science

• Lecture slides for the first section of the course covering course introduction, driving technology, and HPCC current status and futures.
• NPAC Technical Report (1995): Basic Issues and Current Status of Parallel Computing.
• NPAC Technical Report (1992): Prospects for Parallel Computing.
• An Application Discussion focussing on industry with three application areas : Chemistry, CFD, and Monte Carlo Simulations covered as case studies.
• A list of Grand Challenge Applications in high performance computing and communication (HPPC).
• An Overview of Recent Supercomputers (1996) by van der Steen and Dongarra.

Parallel Computing and Architectures

• Lecture slides for second section of the course covering mainly Parallel Architectures including analogies with society, SIMD versus MIMD, Interconnection Networks, Petaflop Dreams, etc.
• Computer Architecture is a chaper from the Computational Science Education Project (CSEP). It covers both sequential as well as parallel architectures.
• Parallel Computing: an elementary course from Edinburgh Parallel Computing Center. There are also other related tools.
• Lecture slides for the third section of the course -- Parallel Programming in Data Parallel and Message Passing styles illustrated for Laplace's Equation. Also, performance issues were considered.
• Global Educational Resources for HPC. A very useful directory.

Algorithms and Applications

• Lecture slides: Statistics and Random Numbers, in preparation for Monte Carlo Integrals.
• Background materials on Random Number Generators (RNG), from the CSEP book.
• Lecture slides: ODE's and Computing Techniques for Particle Systems, and the same material appeared in written text.
• Background materials on Ordinary Differential Equations, from the CSEP book.
• Numerical Integration Module including details on Monte Carlo Methods.
• Lecture slides: Adaptive Parallel Computing Techniques for Numerical Integration apply parallel computing to numerical integration.
• Lecture slides: Iterative Methods for Partial Differential Equations.
• Lecture slides: Motivation for Partial Differential Equations where this has extensive discussion of CFD and the Navier Stokes equation which was prepared for CPS713 and can be ignored here. The initial remarks on relative role of PDE's, Monte Carlo, and particle dynamics has value.
• Further references are: Basic Discussion of PDE's in CSEP Project.
• More examples in Material Balance Section.
• A very good discussion of iterative methods is in Templates for the Solution of Linear Systems: Building Blocks for Iterative Methods, by Dongarra et al.
• A good introduction to numerical linear algebra comes from the HPSC group at the University of Colorado covering basic matrix analysis, elementary ODE's and Fourier Analysis.
• The full HPSC material is available in postscript by ftp. You may need to fetch the numerical analysis module for use in the course.
• Lecture slides: Linear Algebra Presentation that continues from the HPSC resource with eigenvalues and eigenvectors.
• Lecture slides: Finite Element and Conjugate Gradient Presentation with analogies to minimization methods.
• Lecture slides: Parallel Full Matrix Algorithms.
• More parallel computing materials, algorithms, tutorials are available at Computational Science page.
• On mesh and grid generation take a look at Finite Element Mesh Generation.
• For a good survey on N-Body Methods Resources, see this page at EPCC.