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The National Center for Supercomputing Applications is offering a new Web-based course, "Introduction to Multi-core Performance". This tutorial helps current and prospective users of multi-core systems understand and utilize multi-core technology to accelerate their research. Multi-core processors, which hold the promise of enhanced performance and more efficient parallel processing, are a key stepping stone on the path to petascale computation. Applications that run on
multi-core systems must be optimized to take full advantage of the improved performance offered by multi-core technology.

The introductory tutorial covers topics on terminology, cache performance, multi-core and cache effects with respect to MPI using simple MPI benchmarks, and application optimization. Each of the sections in the multi-core performance course offers a statement of objectives and a brief introduction. The examples that are provided throughout the tutorial were run on three TeraGrid systems with multi-core processors, each consisting of many multi-core machines assembled as a Linux cluster. Self-tests help users check their understanding of the material resented.

The new multi-core performance course uses NCSA's CI-Tutor, a Web-based course tool. CI-Tutor currently offers 11 courses covering high-performance computing topics such as code debugging, MPI, scientific visualization, and performance tuning. There are no restrictions on who can take a course. Anyone can create a login to access the available courses. To browse the course catalog, go to http://ci-tutor.ncsa.uiuc.edu/browse.php. To create a login and take a course, go to http://ci-tutor.ncsa.uiuc.edu/.

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