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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.

• Overheads. In order to save on wasted photocopying, we will not be handing out copies of overheads at lectures. Instead these will be made available on-line here, before each lecture, so that students who so wish can print and bring along their own copies.
  • Overheads will appear here

  In addition, here is a copy of the overhead set from last year. These may be amended as we go along, so you shouldn't treat a particular slide as finalised until it appears in the section above.

• Practical exercises. There are two practical exercises for each level (i.e. 10 and 11). Provisionally we plan that the deadline for exercise 1 (for both levels) will be on Friday 12th February 2010 and that the deadline for exercise 2 (for both levels) will be on Friday 19th March 2010.

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

• Miscellaneous
  • 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 -lpthread filename.c

    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, the simple MPI prime sieve program, task farm program, and a brief guide to using MPI on DICE.
  • There is a wealth of reference and tutorial material on MPI on the web. We particularly recommend the first two links listed below. The third one links to the definitive collection of MPI links, which you may care to browse.
    • A chapter on MPI from Ian Foster's online Book Designing and Building Parallel Programs.
    • Peter Pacheco's Guide
    • The MPI homepage
  • 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

Marcelo Cintra IF room 1.03, ext. 505118