COM 1770/COM 3620 (Parallel Computing)

Instructor: Gene Cooperman
Spring, 2003
Tuesday and Wednesday, 11:45 - 1:20
(The graduate course is combined with undergraduate senior honors seminar.)

NOTE: Please note the change of time from what's listed by the registrar. We will use the full 1-1/2 hours on Tuesday and Wednesday, and omit the Friday class described in the Registrar's schedule.

The tasks have now been handed out in class. A "rough" implementation (not necessarily completely working) is due by Tuesday, May 13, so that we can agree on APIs between modules. There will also shortly be an on-line list of tasks and projects to reflect the class decisions. The old solution for Robust Slaves proposed by the class is on the Web.

There is a file, EMAIL, with individual and course e-mail lists in the course directory. Feel free to use it to encourage out-of-class discussion. It also says who is on what project.

There was a request on background material reviewing C for C++ and Java programmers, which I've added. The networking project must be done in C.

(Please scroll down to see the latest topics I've added.)

An overview of TOP-C (postscript) is available.

The list of projects based on TOP-C is now available.

Cache coherency

Pointers to other sites' course notes on shared memory (especially cache coherence).
Shared memory architectures (Part of CS6820 at Utah) (see especially Shared Memory Multiprocessors, Part 1) (and optionally Snooping based Multiprocessors)

Sockets (client-server programming)

Berkeley sockets and Client-Server model (recommended as concise summary of concepts)
Beej's Guide to Network Programming: Using Internet Sockets (excellent survey)
Socket programming
Client Server Computing - Unix Sockets and RPC

Socket Example programs:

server.c and client.c in C
Server.java and Client.java in Java (and local copy) WARNING: Do not leave the java Server program running. It allows the client to execute arbitrary commands in your account.

MPI

See NOTES/mpi-overview and NOTES/mpi-quick-ref.ps of the course directory.

Other Models of Parallelism

Cilk (see also a Cilk tutorial) (especially good for shared memory and for recursion)
Linda (see also Javaspaces, a Linda-like implementation on top of Jini); (especially good for distributed memory --- pool of tasks, and each worker process "pulls" in a task from the pool; This should be distinguished from TOP-C, which generates a task for a worker process on demand)
OpenMP (utilities above level of POSIX threads)

Reports by Students

Igor Malioutov: Geant4 and Dark Matter (Wed., 5/7/03)
Eugenio Korolev: Automatic (annotated) Marshalling: Extensions to Marshalgen, with applications to Geant4 (Wed., 5/7/03)
Doug Ticson: TOP-C driving multiple store requests on DB (Tues, 5/13/03)
Geoff Krapf: Overcoming the bottleneck of slow disks (Tues, 5/13/03)
Eric Smith: TopJ: Integrating the TOP-C library with parallel Java applications (Wed, 5/21/03)
David Hirst: Integrating the components of a more robust TOP-C implementation (Tues, 5/27/03)
Corey Capone, Chris Cieslik, and Diana Soroko: The master, the slave and the database in a more robust TOP-C implementation (Tues, 5/27/03)
Jessie Wan Foong, Marie Izquierdo, and Oludare Oyedele: Client-server communication in a more robust TOP-C implementation (Tues, 5/27/03)
Doug Ticson: UPDATE: TOP-C driving multiple store requests on DB (Wed, 5/28/03)
Geoff Krapf: UPDATE: Overcoming the bottleneck of slow disks (Wed, 5/28/03)

Future Topics (time permitting):

Parallel Algorithms
Corba
Legion (meta-computing)

The original announcement for COM 3620/COM 1770 is under syllabus.txt.