Revising and Expanding a Blue Waters Curriculum Module as a Parallel Computing Learning Experience

Volume 7, Issue 1 (April 2016), pp. 31–39

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@article{jocse-7-1-4,
  author={Ruth Catlett and David Toth},
  title={Revising and Expanding a Blue Waters Curriculum Module as a Parallel Computing Learning Experience},
  journal={The Journal of Computational Science Education},
  year=2016,
  month=apr,
  volume=7,
  issue=1,
  pages={31--39},
  doi={https://doi.org/10.22369/issn.2153-4136/7/1/4}
}

The party problem is a mathematical problem in the discipline of Ramsey Theory. Because of the problems embarrassingly parallel nature, its extreme computational requirements, and its relative ease of understanding implementation with a nave algorithm, it is well suited to serve as an example problem for teaching parallel computing. Years ago, a curriculum module for Blue Waters was developed using this problem. However, delays in the delivery of Blue Waters resulted in the module being released before Blue Waters was accessible. Therefore, performance data and compilation instructions for Blue Waters were not available. We have revised the module to provide source code for new versions of the programs to demonstrate more parallel computing libraries. We have also added performance data and compilation instructions for the code in the old version of the module and for the new implementations, which take advantage of the capabilities of the Blue Waters supercomputer now that it is available.