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Parallel Programming Languages and Systems

• Course Descriptors: UG4, MSc

• Textbook. The recommended textbook for the course is Foundations of Multithreaded, Parallel and Distributed Programming by Greg Andrews. There are a number of copies in the reserve section of the library.

• Lecture Log giving a brief indication of the material and slides covered in each lecture, and suggests corresponding reading material from the course text and elsewhere.

• Course overheads Printed copies of the full overhead set will be available from the Informatics Teaching Office (Appleton Tower level 4) by the start of the semester. I may make small improvements or corrections to the online version as the course progresses. I will notify you if anything significant changes.

• Practical exercises. There are two practical exercises for each level (i.e. 10 and 11). Each will be worth 10% of the overall course assessment. For convenience, each exercise will be marked out of 100. Since PPLS is a particularly large class this year, we anticipate that marking and return of feedback may take up to three weeks in each case, although we will attempt to turn it around in two.
  • Exercise 1: UG4 (level 10), MSc (level 11). The deadline is 4pm on Thursday 14th February, 2013.

  • Exercise 2: UG4 (level 10), MSc (level 11). The deadline is 4pm on Thursday 21st March, 2013.

    Here are the files for the MPI programs:

    • aquadsequential.c
    • aquad.c
    • stack.h
    • stack.c
    • stackdemo.c

    Here is the guide to using MPI on DICE. Note that, in line with student requests, this exercise has been released before some relevant material has been covered in lectures. You may prefer to wait, or to read ahead in the lecture overheads.

    Here is the paper Questions and Answers about BSP.

• Past Papers You can find past papers in the ITO past papers repository, or as hard copy in the library.

• Miscellaneous
  • The Free Lunch Is Over: A Fundamental Turn Toward Concurrency in Software, is an interesting background article on the march of parallelism into the mainstream.

  • Papers on the growing importance of patterns in parallel programming:
    • Parallel Computing with Patterns and Frameworks, by Catanzaro & Keutzer.
    • Structured Parallel Programming with Deterministic Patterns, by McCool.

  • The code for our simple Pthreads programs Good Hello World, Bad Hello World, Good Counter, Bad Counter, Good Producer-Consumer, Bad Producer-Consumer and Jacobi is available. On DICE machines, copy into a filename.c and compile with

    gcc -o filename filename.c -lpthread

    then run with

    ./filename
    

  • There is a reasonable tutorial on Pthreads at Introduction to POSIX Threads Programming by Blaise M. Barney

  • The code for the simple Java programs Hello World, Readers and Writers and Broken Readers and Writers.

  • Alternatively, you can run the Pthreads, Java and MPI demos across the web.

  • Two interesting articles (not examinable) on nasty problems with the original Java Memory Consistency Model, Fixing the Java Memory Model, Part 1 and Fixing the Java Memory Model, Part 2.

  • The code for an MPI Hello World program and the MPI task farm program from lectures. For the prime sieve example you need two files, the generator and the sieve.

  • A guide to using MPI on DICE.

  • There is a wealth of reference and tutorial material on MPI on the web. The first two links listed below are good introductions, while the third contains documentation on the implementation we use in the course. The fourth one links to the definitive collection of MPI links.
    • A chapter on MPI from Ian Foster's online Book Designing and Building Parallel Programs.
    • Peter Pacheco's Guide
    • The OpenMPI homepage, where you will find documentation about the MPI implementation we use in the course.
    • The MPI homepage containing links to various other information about MPI.

  • Useful material on Threading Building Blocks can be found at
    • Threading Building Blocks Open Source website, particularly under Documentation.
    • The TBB Tutorial.
    • The Fibonacci example from lectures in which the task graph is constructed directly is taken from this paper by Gonzalez and Fraguela.

  • New to C? Get some advice or play around with my C demo program.

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Murray Cole, IF room 1.18, ext. 505154