Introduction to Parallel Computing

CS 220-01, Fall 2011

MWF 11:45-12:50, KA 172

Professor: Peter Pacheco
Office: Harney 540
Phone: 422-6630
Email: user: peter, domain: cs.usfca.edu
Office Hours: Mon 4-5, Wed and Fri 10-11, and by appointment


TA: Shah El-Rahman
Email: user: snelrahman, domain: cs.usfca.edu
Office Hours: Tue and Thu 1:30-2:30 and 4:30-5:30 in HR 530 or HR 535


Class Website: http://cs.usfca.edu/~peter/cs220
Class Mailing List: The earlier instructions for joining the list were incorrect. Please send your preferred email address to the instructor, and he'll add you to the list.
Once you're a member of the list you can also post messages by sending email to user cs220 in the domain cs.usfca.edu.


Texts:
Required: Brian Kernighan and Dennis Ritchie, The C Programming Language, 2nd edition, Prentice-Hall, 1988.
Optional: Peter Pacheco An Introduction to Parallel Programming, Morgan-Kaufmann, 2011.


Prerequisites: CS 110 and permission of instructor, or CS 112.


Coursework and Grades: I will base your final grade on 10 homework assigments, 5 programming assignments, 2 midterms, and a final exam, weighted as follows.
Homework 10 @ 1.5% each 15%
Programs 1 and 2 6% each 12%
Programs 3, 4, and 5 8% each 24%
Midterms 2 @ 12% each 24%
Final Exam 25%
Total 100%
I will assign grades on a straight scale. Roughly, 90-100% is an A, 80-89% is a B, 65-79% is a C, 55-64% is a D, and 0-54% is an F.


Attendance and Lateness: Attendance is not required. However, you are responsible for all of the material covered in class, regardless of whether it is covered in the texts. Being late to class is unacceptable. You may have one unexcused late arrival. Subsequent late arrivals may affect your grade.


Academic Honesty: As a Jesuit institution committed to cura personalis - the care and education of the whole person - USF has an obligation to embody and foster the values of honesty and integrity. USF upholds the standards of honesty and integrity from all members of the academic community. All students are expected to know and adhere to the University's Honor Code. You can find the full text of the code online at http://www.usfca.edu/fogcutter.
From a practical standpoint it is fine for you to discuss homework and programs with your classmates. Any other collaboration is unacceptable. In particular, copying another person's work is unacceptable. Students who violate these rules will receive an F in the course. Repeat violators may be subject to more severe penalties.


Computer Access: You may use any of the Computer Science Department computers in Harney 235, 530, and 536. You do not need to own a computer for this class.


Learning Outcomes: In this course students will learn
  1. To program in C,
  2. The basics of parallel architectures,
  3. To write parallel programs using several widely used parallel API's,
  4. Basic parallel debugging, and
  5. Basic evaluation of parallel program performance.
Tentative Course Outline:


Week Material
8/23-8/26 Preliminaries. Overview of Parallel Computing.
8/29-9/2 Basic C. Functions in C.
Homework 1 due Friday, 9/2.
9/6-9/9 Pointers and arrays in C.
Homework 2 due Friday, 9/9.
9/12-9/16 The preprocessor, strings and structs in C.
Program 1 due Wednesday, 9/14.
Homework 3 due Friday, 9/16.
9/19-9/23 Dynamic memory allocation and linked lists in C.
Homework 4 due Friday, 9/23.
9/26-9/30 Basic MPI and the cluster.
Homework 5 due Friday, 9/30.
10/3-10/7 Basic I/O in distributed memory programs.
Program 2 due Monday, 10/3.
Midterm 1, Wednesday, 10/5.
10/12-10/14 Collective communication in MPI. Bitwise operations in C.
Homework 6 due Friday, 10/14.
10/17-10/21 More collective communications.
Homework 7 due Friday, 10/21.
10/24-10/28 Two-dimensional arrays in C. Data distributions.
Program 3 due Wednesday, 10/26.
Homework 8 due Friday, 10/28.
10/31-11/4 Sorting on distributed memory systems. Basic Pthreads.
Homework 9 due Friday, 11/4.
11/7-11/11 Critical sections, mutexes and semaphores.
Homework 10 due Friday, 11/11.
11/14-11/18 Cache Coherence.
Program 4 due Monday, 11/14.
Midterm 2, Friday, 11/18.
11/21-11/23 Tree search and TSP.
11/28-12/2 Barriers, condition variables and thread safety.
Homework 11 due Friday, 12/2.
12/5-12/7 CUDA.
Program 5 due Monday, 12/5.
Homework 12 due Wednesday, 12/7.


File translated from TEX by TTHgold, version 4.00.
On 26 Aug 2011, 10:01.