Workshop Narrative: the Amdahl Executable

Overview

Questions

• What is the central example in an HPC Carpentry workshop?
• What does the Amdahl program do?
• Why do we need amdahl when there are lots of parallel applications out there?
• How do I install the amdahl package?

Objectives

After this episode, Instructors will be able to…

• Describe the story we tell to guide learners through an HPC Carpentry workshop.
• Describe what the Amdahl executable does.
• Install the Amdahl executable.

Key Points

• HPC Carpentry workshops are centered on an exploration of Amdahl’s law of scaling, illustrating the diminishing gains of increasingly parallelisation.
• Amdahl is a Python executable that runs for a specified amount of time but does nothing else.
• amdahl is in the Python package index (pip install amdahl) as well as the EESSI virtual filesystem
• amdahl depends on mpi4py and a working MPI installation!