We'll try to run this with course with as little paper as possible. Please
email your assignment to culler@cs.berkeley.edu.
Intro part
Please include your name, email, URL, and student ID.
Describe in a paragraph what you hope to get out of this course.
Book Problems Culler and Singh:
1.3, 1.4, 1.5, 1.8, 1.9, 1.18 plus one other problem
from Chapter 1 of your choice.
Micro-research study (one page):
Locate an important service that is provided on a parallel
machine. Describe what it is, what the machine is, and what parallel
software provides the service on the machine. For example, the inktomi
search engine (www.inktomi.com) which
underlies hotbot, yahoo, msn and several others is a two-hundred-and-some
processor cluster based on NOW (now.cs.berkeley.edu).
It runs specialized search software that utilizes parallelism at several
levels: it spreads queries over the nodes (since the start and end
of each is sequential), it performs each search on all the nodes (since
the database is partitioned over the nodes), and it performs multiple searches
simultaneously (since some may go to disk). Think ebay, walmart, bank of
america, hot mail, etc. Think big. If it is big computing,
you'll probably find that it is parallel.