CS 5955 – Practical Parallel and Concurrent Programming – Fall 2010

Lecture 1, August 27, 2010

Contents

1  General Course Info

2  Learning Goals

The goals of this course are to discuss current topics in parallel and concurrent programming. This will be accomplished through a series of talks covering some of the units described at http://research.microsoft.com/ppcp. There will be other invited talks also. The currently anticipated speakers are listed in Section 6.

This class meets once a week and run in a research seminar mode. It is highly recommended that you take this class and other parallel programming/concurrency classes, such as 4961, Parallel Programming taught by Professor Hall.

3  Grading

Those taking PPCP for two credits must participate in the lectures and do the class exercises. Those taking PPCP for three credits must additionally work on the “more difficult” exercises or work on a project (we can discuss possible topics). We’d like everyone to complete a brief pre-survey that is NOT GRADED and optional kept at https://www.surveymonkey.com/s/HMMYVST.

4  Links to Units

All the course material (besides assignments) will be kept in the directory PPCP-Course-Material/ppcp.

For assignments, go to this directory: homework/. Assignments are provided in a .zip file, which includes the handout .pdf.

4.1  Lecture Slides

Note: The PPCP powerpoint slides are in Office 2010 format.

4.2  Units Source Code

The following are links to the zip files for each unit we cover that has source code. The source code has tons of examples on almost every code snippet covered on the slides and more.

5  Other Useful Information

Alpaca Installer and Introduction: PPCP-Course-Material/ppcp/alpaca

This is the MSR book on Parallel Patterns and .NET: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ff963553.aspx, the online version, or you may download a preliminary version here: PPCP-Course-Material/ParallelProgrammingWithMS.Net_Preliminary.pdf

Here are some variants on Amdahl’s Law: http://www.cs.wisc.edu/multifacet/amdahl/

Here’s a free e-book on parallelism, from Intel Cilk: http://software.intel.com/en-us/articles/intel-cilk/

Thanks to our recent visitor Stephen Toub, we have his Colloquium slides and his Visual Studio code available for download.

Here are the chapters to our visitor Tim Mattson’s book, Patterns for Parallel Programming, chapters 1 and 2 , 3 , 4 , and 5 (all .pdf).

6  Weekly Schedule (subject to change)


This document was translated from LATEX by HEVEA.