CMSC416/616 Fall 24 (Parallel Computing)

Parallel Computing (CMSC416/CMSC616)

Assignment 0.1: Using the Linux Shell on HPC Clusters

Due: September 10, 2024 @ 11:59 PM Eastern Time

The purpose of this programming assignment is to gain experience in using a Linux shell and shell commands for tasks such as compiling a program, editing source code, submitting a batch job, and submitting your assignments as tarballs to gradescope. You will find this MIT course and command line reference useful.

Reminder: login nodes are for code development and compilation only. Any runs including launching your parallel program should be done in a batch job or interactive job.

Steps to Follow

Download cpi-openmp.c, an OpenMP program that calculates the value of Pi in parallel, to zaratan. You can either clone the git repository on zaratan or download the file locally to your laptop first and then scp to zaratan.
Compile cpi-omp.c using gcc:
gcc -O2 -fopenmp -o cpi-omp cpi-omp.c
Also, get familiar with using make. A sample Makefile is here. If you specify the openmp target by typing: make cpi-omp, you should not see any errors.
Run the code by submitting a batch job using sbatch and a batch script. The batch script that is provided is hard-coded for a 16-thread run.
Run the code as an interactive job using sinteractive. More details on that are on the Zaratan quick primer page.

What to Submit

You must submit the following files and no other files in a single tarball with extension .tar.gz (delete the executable and any other files not mentioned below before using tar):

cpi-omp.c
Makefile that will compile your code successfully on zaratan when using gcc.
Output file (my-openmp.out) from running the batch job. You only need to submit the output from the batch job and not the interactive job.

You should put the code, Makefile and output files in a single directory (named LastName-FirstName-assign0.1), compress it to .tar.gz (LastName-FirstName-assign0.1.tar.gz) using:


        tar -cvzf <tarname>.tar.gz <dirname>

The tar command can be executed on zaratan, you can then scp the tarball to your laptop, and then upload the tarball to gradescope.

Important things to check before submitting:

Remove unnecessary files (the executable, slurm-*.out files, etc.) before creating the tarball.
When issuing the tar command, the current working directory (cwd) should be the parent directory of LastName-FirstName-assign0.1.
Do not issue the tar command from your top-level home directory or from within the assignment directory or anywhere else. When we use untar on your tarball, it should untar cleanly to create a single directory named LastName-FirstName-assign0.1 with all the required files in it.

Resources

Grading

This assigment is for 0 points. However, all students are required to complete the assignment. The autograder for this assignment will check that you created the tarball correctly.