Tuesdays and Thursdays, 10:00-11:45, AS 372.
May 30 is an exchange day -- no class.
This course will focus on parallel processing architecture, specialized and systolic parallel architectures, routing issues, and algorithms. We will be using the department's MasPar MP-2204 for several assignments. The related course, Topics in Parallel Computation, offered in alternate years, covers a mostly disjoint set of material. Last year, we studied applied parallel algorithms; next year may focus on parallel programming languages and environments or some other topics.
Parallel Processing: From Applications to Systems, Dan Moldovan, Morgan Kaufmann, 1993. This book (our main text) is as slanted to SIMD processing as the one two years ago, listed next, is to MIMD processing. We'll try to fill in the gaps.
Advanced Computer Architecture, Kai Hwang, McGraw Hill, 1993. New edition of Hwang and Briggs, but not 10 years old.
Highly Parallel Computing, George S. Almasi and Allan Gottlieb, Benjamin/Cummings, 1994. Another second edition (but without dropping an author). Slanted toward multiprocessors, it includes excellent overviews of parallel applications, programming methodologies, and operating systems.
VLSI Array Processors, S. Y. Kung, Prentice Hall, 1988. Signal processing, image processing, and other array applications.
Computer Architecture and Parallel Processing, Kai Hwang and Fayé A. Briggs, McGraw Hill, 1984. Strong on hardware and network configurations; a previous version of the course text.
A reader with some MasPar documentation will be available at the copy center soon.
Subscription to comp.parallel and comp.super is encouraged. You should also look around David Bader's parallel site:
http://www.umiacs.umd.edu/~dbader/sites.htmlwhich you can also get to via my ``other pages'' page.
Course work will include a number of homework assignments and a class project and presentation. A couple of the homework assignments will include short class presentations, seminar style.
For the project, a brief (paragraph) project proposal will at the end of the fifth week (May 4), and a short 3-5 page discussion of the problem (suitable for the introductory section of your project report) in the 6th week of class (May 11). The presentations during the last two weeks should be detailed, and you should provide reading material during the period before your talk. The final report will be due on Wednesday, June 14, at 5pm.
I'll have a list of possible topics soon. Browsing through recent issues of appropriate journals (such as Transactions on Parallel and Distributed Systems and the Journal of Parallel and Distributed Processing) and proceedings (such as Supercomputing, Int. Conf. Parallel Processing, and Application Specific Array Processors) may suggest some topics.
The Baskin center has a MasPar MP-2204. The machine features 4096 32-bit processing elements, a global router connecting the processing elements and 128 Mbytes of global memory (`IO RAM'), and a gcc-derivative for programming. Their benchmarks include 17,000 32-bit MIPS and 1,600 32-bit MFLOPS.
Interested people may wish to locally experiment with MIMD-style programming using Modula*, PVM, or a similar package.
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