The recent increasing demand on understanding, predicting, modeling and simulating the properties and synthesis of emergent new quantum materials rises the necessity of more and more computational power, in order to solve condensed matter problems of larger and larger size.

Such request is at the basis of the developement of parallel computing, that exploits the simultaneous use of multiple compute resources to solve large and/or complex problems, that are impractical or impossible to solve on a single computer.

In this seminar I will introduce the basis of parallel programming both on shared memory architectures, based on OpenMP standard, and on distributed memory systems, whose most commonly used standard is the Message-Passing Interface (MPI). I will discuss the implementations and the main features of both standards, with a special focus on the advantages and limitations of their usage.