SC 730 PARALLEL ALGORITHMS
Material covered:
Introduction to high-performance computing (based on: J.J. Dongarra,
I.S. Duff, D.C. Sorensen, H.A. van der Vorst, Numerical Linear Algebra for
High-Performance Computers, pages 1-69)
Trends in computer design
Traditional computers
parallelism within a single processor
multiple functional units
pipelining
RISC
VLIW
vector processing
chaining
memory "management" inside the processor
memory organization
main memory
cache memory
main memory
memory management
Parallel computers
Flynt taxonomy
processor arrays
shared memory computers and their limitations
message passing
interconnection topologies
virtual shared memory
cluster computers
Sorting
designing parallel merge-sort
HOMEWORK 1. Implement parallel merge-sort and present the performance
data. Due by Thursday, March 4th.