NSF/TCPP Curriculum Planning workshop Behrooz Shirazi Washington State University February 2010

NSF/TCPP Curriculum Planning workshop

Behrooz ShiraziWashington State University

February 2010

Introductory Course on Parallel Computation (version 1)

• Senior/first year grad level course• Course is taught in Spring 2010• Course taught by adjunct prof. (John Feo) –

senior technical staff at Pacific Northwest National Lab (PNNL)

• PNNL is heavily involved in both compute-intensive and data-intensive HPC

• Very practical and application oriented


• Programming model using task parallelism with message passing.

• Move from focus on data distribution to parallelism.• Think parallel, and optimize for performance and

scalability. • Course based on Cray XMT, a shared-memory,

multithreaded computer system. • On the Cray XMT, performance is only a function of

parallelism (supporting all parallel models including data, task, recursion, and dataflow).

• Course require team work to prepare 3 papers that include algorithm development and implementation.


• Topics: – General concepts– Cray XMT architecture– Cray XMT programming model– Cray XMT programming tools– Reasoning about performance on the Cray XMT– Data parallelism– Task parallelism– Using and optimizing recursive algorithms– Dataflow– Graph algorithms– Other cool algorithms


• Course Taught: Spring, 2009 by a CS faculty (KC Wang)• Based on class notes• Recommended reading: – Highly Parallel Computing, G.S. Almasi & A. Gottlieb,

Benjamin/Cummings, 1989/1994– Introduction to Parallel Computing, 2nd Edition,

Grama/Gupta/Karypis/Kumar, Addison Wesley,2003 – Computer Architecture and Parallel Processing, K. Hwang

& F.A. Briggs, McGraw-Hill, 1990– The Art of Parallel Programming, B. Lester, 1stWorld

Publishing, 2006– Journal Articles


• Class Notes/Topics:– Introduction to Parallel Computing– Multicore Processors– POSIX pthreads Programming– Pthreads– Cache memory and Cache Coherence in MP– Finite field GF(2) and Applications– Interconnect Networks for MP– Multicomputers– How to get MPI– MPI Programming– Parallel Pi using MPI– Parallel Pi using Monte-Carlo Method– Diffusion, MPI code, etc– Shortest Path Algorithm– Fast Fourier Transform (FFT)– Current Supercomputers


• Assignments:– Multi-threading– Mutex-semaphore-thread_join for MTX– Pthreads Programming– HELP : Gaussian Elimination by Threads– Parallel Quicksort


• Semester Taught: Spring, 2007 by CS faculty Murali Medidi• Books used:

– An introduction to Parallel Algorithms (Joseph Jaja)– Parallel Computation Models and Methods (Selim G. Akl)

• Topics– MPI tutorial– Parallel Algorithms

• sorting algorithm• Minimum spanning tree• shortest path• matrix manipulation• sorting networks

– Super computer architecture.• Mesh• Cube• PRAM model CRCW, CREW, ERCW, etc.

• Projects/1 term paper/5 homeworks/ 2 closed-book exams

Documents

NSF/TCPP Curriculum Planning workshop Behrooz Shirazi Washington State University February 2010