High Performance Computing and Networking Lab (HPCNL)

HPCNL involves the industry and academia by organizing workshops on state-of-the-art technologies. It also offers various short courses on emerging technologies and paradigms. Listed below are the workshops and courses conducted so far.

Programming Multi-Core Processor based Embedded, Mobile, and Distributed Systems—A Hands-On Approach
This short but extensive course covered state-of-the-art technologies and programming environments for leading multicore processors: Cavium Networks’ Octeon Processor using Octeon SDK, ARM multicore processors based mobile devices using Android, General Purpose Nvidia GPUs using CUDA, IBM Cell Processor using Cell-SDK, Cloud Computing using Hadoop/MapReduce, and Virtualization using KVM hypervisor. The topics included (1) Overview and taxonomy of multi-core processor architectures (2) Octeon processor and Cavium SDK (3) Linux kernel for multicore  embedded systems (4) Real time OS (RTOS) (5) Performance measurement  and tuning (6) Multithreaded Android development (7) Parrallel Computing on Sony Playstation 3 (8) Introduction to CUDA on multi-core GPU’s, and (9)  Introduction to cloud computing and virtualization.

4th International Conference on Open-Source Systems and Technologies (ICOSST-2010), Lahore, Pakistan
HPCNL staff has been actively contributing to the success of ICOSST conferences, in the form of paper reviews, invited talks, workshops, session chairs etc. In ICOSST 2010, HPCNL’s consultant Dr. Abdul Waheed (Senior Performance Engineer, Cisco Systems USA and adjunct professor UET Lahore Pakistan) delivered an invited talk titled “Multicore System and Application Performance Engineering”. Similarly, two workshops on topics (1) Linux & Memory Maps, and (2) Exploring Linux Kernel the Easy Way, were also organized by HPCNL team members.

Parallel Programming Paradigms for Multi-Core Processors Based Systems—A Hands-On Experience on Intel and Sony PS 3 Platforms 
This short course focused on state-of-the-art programming paradigms that are useful for software development for multi-core architectures: explicit message-passing, shared address space based computing, multi-threading, map-reduce, and Compute Unified Device Architecture (CUDA). It provided a brief introduction to each of these paradigms with emphasis on hands-on experience to enable students to become familiar with them for developing parallel applications. Students had an opportunity to learn parallel application development on Intel quad-core processor based servers and Sony Playstation 3 games console as target multi-core platform. The session included (1) Overview of parallel computing (2) An overview of explicit message-passing, shared address space based computing, and multi-threading on Intel's multi-core systems and Sony Playstation 3 (3) Introduction to MapReduce, and (4) Introduction to CUDA on multi-core processors.

A Workshop on Next Generation Computing Paradigms
In this workshop the need for next generation computing paradigms are highlight along with the discussion on such existing computing paradigms and some complex engineering problems are identified that require these computing paradigms. The sessions included (1) Virtualization & wireless network communication (2) Performance Characterization of Multi-core Architectures (3) Cloud Computing & ‘MapReduce’ Framework (4) Parallel Programming Paradigms and (5) Hardware accelerators (Floware).

Network Technologies Research Workshop
This workshop focused on the research in state-of-the-art network technologies. Four key areas were identified by the participating researchers: Performance/Measurements (Lead: Dr. Abdul Waheed (CISCO, USA)), Protocols and Algorithms (Lead: Junaid Qadir (NUST)), Next Generation (NG) Networks (Lead: Dr. Aamir Qayyum (MAJU)), and Security (Lead: Ali Hammad Akbar (KICS-UET)). The effort motivated students from various universities for collaboration in the identified areas. This workshop was partially funded by CISCO Pakistan.

2nd International Conference on Open-Source Systems and Technologies (ICOSST-2007), Lahore, Pakistan
In ICOSST 2007, Dr. Waheed delivered an invited talk titled as “Performance Engineering using Open Source Software”. Also, he was session chair of “Open-Source Software Engineering” session.