CS G280: Parallel Computing

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The schedule of final talks is now available. Please register for a time slot. Please also update your "Description of Projects" with your final report by Tuesday, Dec. 11 (last class). Thank you.

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Syllabus

Instructor: Prof. Gene Cooperman
Course Time: Tuesdays, 6:00 - 9:00 p.m.
Prerequisites: general sophistication in UNIX programming
NOTE: Please ignore the catalog description for CS G280. It dates from circa 1990, and has nothing to do with the modern world.

Parallel computing today is dominated by commodity hardware and the use of standardized protocols and system services. It is related to distributed computing, with the following important difference: parallel computing assumes that the CPU is the bottleneck, while distributed computing assumes that the network (bandwidth and/or latency) is the bottleneck. The emphasis will be on understanding the many middleware technologies and adapting them to parallel computing. The course will include a project requiring use of one or more of the middleware technologies. For a sampling of projects, see http://www.ccs.neu.edu/home/gene/projects.html . Additional project proposals are welcome.

You can also gain an overview of this course by looking at the slides from a minicourse that I taught.

Professor G. Cooperman
Office: 336 West Village Hall
e-mail: gene@ccs.neu.edu
Phone: 373-8686
Office Hours: Tues. 5:00 - 6:00; and Friday at 12:30; and by appointment.

Textbook: None (Course notes and pointers to the web will be used.)

Exams and Grades:

There will be one mid-term, and a project. They will be weighted 35\% for the midterm, 55\% for the project and 10\% for class participation. The project will be given in several parts, with oral presentations and written components. The precise schedule for the project will depend on the number and the interests of the students.

Students will have an opportunity to choose a project from a range including extending an implementation of MPI, solving an applied problem using a parallel tool, and a study of current literature on some parallel algorithms.

TOPICS

TOPIC 1: Brief Introduction to Parallel Computing via TOP-C
TOPIC 2: Hardware Interface:
POSIX Threads (shared memory), TCP/IP Sockets (distributed memory), and DSM (distributed shared memory): cache coherence, bus snooping, synchronization, TCP/IP parameters, and other topics Intermediate models (neither distributed nor shared): COMA, CC-NUMA, DSM
TOPIC 3: Algorithmic Concepts:
parallel prefix, pointer jumping, PRAM and bridging models of parallelism
TOPIC 4: Overview of Middleware for Distributed and Parallel Computing:
Corba, XML/SOAP technologies, the Computational Grid protocols, MPI (Message Passing Interface), POSIX threads, TCP/IP services, parallel BLAS (parallel basic linear algebra subroutines), and other "middleware systems".
TOPIC 5: Programmer's Models of Parallelism:
TOPIC 6: Applications of Parallelism