This course exposes students to the principal issues involved in software development for parallel computing and discusses a number of approaches to handle the problems and opportunities caused by the increased availability of parallel platforms.
The course includes lectures, assignments, self-study, and a project. 50% of your grade is determined by project work and 50% is determined by a written exam; the exam is given during the official examination period, and there is no makeup exam. Students must be able to program using Java and C/C++.
The course may cover: memory coherence and consistency models, implications for language-specific memory models, Java memory model, models of parallel programming and parallel program execution, performance models for parallel systems, transactional memory, compiler extraction of parallelism, language and compiler support for parallel programming, threads and their execution environment, synchronization, and implementation issues of these topics.
Lectures are given Mondays 10:15 - 12:00 in HG E 5.
Recitation sessions take place Thursdays 14:15 -- 16:00 in CHN C 14. Some of the recitation session hours will be devoted to other activities (tutorials, reviews, etc) or will be devoted to group meetings. Please watch this page for updates and announcements.
| Week | Monday | Thursday |
|---|---|---|
| 0 | 09/18: No lecture | 09/21: No recitation |
| 1 | 09/25: Organization, Introduction | 09/28: Recitation 1 |
| 2 | 10/2: OpenMP and CUDA | 10/5: Recitation 2 |
| 3 | 10/9: MPI | 10/12: Recitation 3 |
| 4 | 10/16: MPI, collectives, RMA | 10/19: Recitation 4 |
| 5 | 10/23: MPI, memory models | 10/26: CUDA |
| 6 | 10/30:Memory models, fast locks | 11/2: Recitation 6 |
| 7 | 11/6: Memory models, locks | 11/9: Recitation 7 |
| 8 | 11/13: Network architecture topologies | 11/16: Recitation 8 |
| 9 | 11/20: Performance modeling, work and depth | 11/23: Recitation 9 |
| 10 | 11/27: Work stealing | 11/30: Recitation 10 |
| 11 | 12/4: Modeling laws, logp | 12/7: Recitation 11 | >
| 12 | 12/11: Oblivious | 12/14: Recitation 12 | >
| 13 | 12/18: Oblivious | 12/21: Exam prep |
Assignments are an important part of the course. You will not learn this material from listening to a lecture alone and should do the assignments.
Note: Do not hesitate to write an email to your TA if you have trouble with the assignments!
50% of your grade is determined by the project, and the other 50% of the grade is determined by a written 2 hr exam (Example Exam). You are not allowed to use any electronic devices or books, notes, etc. in the exam.