Steven Gordon/Dave Hudak, Ohio Supercomputing Center (X10 team contact: Bard Bloom)

Dr. Gordon and Dr. Hudak of the Ohio Supercomputer Center (OSC) will develop an online tutorial and conduct a two-day workshop entitled "Introduction to X10". The tutorial is targeted at novice-to-intermediate parallel programmers who are unfamiliar with the new concepts contained in X10 and who may, in fact, be hindered by “thinking MPI” or “thinking OpenMP” when approaching X10. The tutorial is designed to progressively increase the complexity of the parallel concepts. The first module prepares students to write efficient scientific code in an object-oriented environment (like Java’s) using X10’s points, regions and arrays. The second module provides an introduction to concurrency by describing activities and selected language constructs (notably, async, atomic and finish). The third module introduces the data layout problem by describing multiple places through array distributions. Finally, the students will put activities and places together (using when and at) for structured multithreading applications in the fourth module. The students will use Eclipse PTP and X10DT and all workshop exercises will be conducted using OSC's Glenn cluster. The tutorial and workshop will be publicized through the OSC Ralph Regula School of Computational Science http://www.rrscs.org/ as well as HPC University http://www.hpcuniv.org/ website. The tutorial materials will also be submitted to the HPC University digital library for wider dissemination.