Programming

The parallel architectures of supercomputers often dictate the use of special programming techniques to exploit their speed. The base language of supercomputer code is generally Fortran or C, using special libraries to share data between nodes. Most commonly, environments such as PVM and MPI for loosely connected clusters and OpenMP for tightly coordinated shared memory machines are used. Significant effort is required to optimize a problem for the interconnect characteristics of the machine it will be run on; the aim is to prevent any of the CPU's from wasting time waiting on data from other nodes.