Title Practical Course: Experimental Evaluation of modern Computing Systems and Accelerators (IN0012, IN2106, IN2397, IN4294)

Dieses Praktikum wird nur in englischer Sprache angeboten.

Experimental Evaluation of modern Computing Systems and Accelerators 

Prof. Dr. Martin Schulz, Dr Amir Raoofy, MSc. Jakob Schäffeler, MSc. Dominik Huber

This lab course will be held in English.

Bachelor/Master practical course (IN0012, IN4294, IN2106, IN2397).

 

The Course

This lab is organized in collaboration with LRZ and LMU.

It is provided seperately for bachelor and master students, but carried out as one event.

Content

The LRZ recently started building a testbed environment with novel architectures and accelerators called BEAST (Bavarian Energy, Architecture and Software Testbed). This will help in shaping future large LRZ systems (such as successors of SuperMUC-NG).

In this lab course, students will have the chance to work on newest HPC technology (such as CPUs or GPUs from Intel, AMD, NVidia, Marvell, Fujitsu), as they are available in the LRZ BEAST environment. Using small example workloads, the tasks in the lab will explore various features of novel technology on the node level. As tasks introduce new technology, the lab organizers will invite vendors to give talks on their newest hardware. The tasks will cover programming models on the node level for multicore CPUs and accelerators, such as OpenMP (for GPU), SIMD, synchronization. For later assignments, students are expected to make use of OpenCL, SYCL, or CUDA.

The lab is split in two types of assignments: for the first part of assignments, students are expected to work on all architectures. For the second part of assignments, students work on specific architectures exclusively (randomly assigned to student groups).

Grading

Students will work in groups of 3, doing reports for each task as well as short presentations of their evaluation results (2 talks every week randomly selected among the groups). Grading is done based on delivered reports and short presentations. This includes source code used for the evaluations, which has to be added to the reports.

Registration

Registration for the lab will happen via the matching system.

Expected Skills

• Good knowledge of C on Linux
• Understanding of terms in computer architecture: pipelining, SIMD, multi-core, SMT, TLB, processor caches, replacement policies (before registering in the matching system, ask yourself if you can explain these terms!)
• Interest in computer architecture, benchmarking, and low-level code optimization

Schedule / Dates

Weekly meetings during the semester: (every Thursday 4pm - 6pm).

First date: 15.10.2026