Use of ICT infrastructure for teaching HPC

Abstract

In this paper we look at modern ICT infrastructure as well as curriculum used for conducting a contemporary course on high performance computing taught over several years at the Faculty of Electronics Telecommunications and Informatics, Gdansk University of Technology, Poland. We describe the infrastructure in the context of teaching parallel programming at the cluster level using MPI, node level using OpenMP and CUDA. We present the curriculum concerning theory and practice as well as we look at the last eight years of students' performance data gathered while teaching the course. We investigate important components and features of the hardware and software needed for conducting a modern set of exercises, along with changes adopted throughout the last years and experiences gained regarding lectures and laboratories.