I note with interest that Pluralsight are offering a 5-day training course in HPC (specifically with CCS, though I imagine that the MPI stuff is suitable across environments).

Details at http://www.pluralsight.com/courses/AppliedComputeClusterServer.aspx

Course Description:

Five intensive days developing parallel applications that take advantage of high-performance clusters and Microsoft Compute Cluster Server .

This course provides in-depth coverage of high-performance application development and design using Microsoft's Compute Cluster Server (CCS). Intended for both commercial developers and academic researchers, our goal is to quickly bring attendees up to speed on the design and development of 64-bit parallel codes. Attendees learn to take full advantage of modern high-performance clusters, from running simple parametric sweeps to developing multi-core, multi-node apps with OpenMP and MSMPI. Discussion includes numerous practical considerations, including data distribution and collection, debugging, porting, performance tuning, visualization, and customizing the client-side submission process. The course follows a lecture/lab format, providing every attendee with hands-on development experience using a CCS cluster. The programming language used is C++.

Highlights

· Introduction to Compute Cluster Server: setup, usage and customization

· Parallel programming — theory and practice

· Parallelizing existing applications for parametric sweep

· Using OpenMP to develop multi-threaded, shared-memory codes

· Using MPI to develop multi-process, distributed-memory codes

· Advanced MPI programming: I/O, processes, groups, and topologies

· Excel Services for CCS

· Integrating SQL Server databases into high-performance applications

· Compiling, tracing and debugging with Microsoft Visual Studio 2005 and Visual C++

· Porting considerations and performance tuning

· Patterns for parallel applications

· Hands-on lab exercises with your very own CCS cluster