U.C. Berkeley CS267/EngC233 Home Page
Applications of Parallel Computers
Spring 2009
M W 9-10:30, 290 Hearst Mining Building
Instructors:
TA:
Administrative Assistants:
Link to webcasting of lectures
(Active during lectures only; see below under "Lecture Notes" for archived video).
Syllabus and Motivation
CS267 was originally designed to teach students how to
program parallel computers to efficiently solve
challenging problems in science and engineering,
where very fast computers are required
either to perform complex simulations or to analyze enormous datasets.
CS267 is intended to be useful for students from many departments
and with different backgrounds, although we will assume reasonable
programming skills in a conventional (non-parallel) language,
as well as enough mathematical skills to understand the
problems and algorithmic solutions presented.
CS267 satisfies part of the course requirements for a new
Designated Emphasis ("graduate minor") in
Computational Science and Engineering.
While this general outline remains, a large change
in the computing world has started in the last few years:
not only are the fastest computers
parallel, but nearly all computers will soon be parallel,
because the physics of semiconductor manufacturing
will no longer let conventional sequential processors
get faster year after year, as they have for so long
(roughly doubling in speed every 18 months for
many years). So all programs that need to
run faster will have to become parallel programs.
(It is considered very unlikely that compilers will be
able to automatically find enough parallelism in most
sequential programs to solve this problem.)
For background on this trend toward parallelism, click
here.
This will be a huge change not just for science
and engineering but the entire computing industry,
which has depended on selling new computers by running
their users' programs faster without the users
having to reprogram them. Large research activities
to address this issue are underway at many computer
companies and universities, including
Berkeley's ParLab,
whose research agenda is outlined
here.
While the ultimate solutions to the parallel programming
problem are far from determined, students in CS267 will
get the skills to use some of the best existing parallel programming
tools, and be exposed to a number of open research questions.
Grading
There will be several programming assignments to acquaint students
with basic issues in memory locality and parallelism needed for
high performance. Most of the grade will be based on a final project
(in which students are encouraged to work in small interdisciplinary teams),
which could involve parallelizing an interesting application, or
developing or evaluating a novel parallel computing tool. Students
are expected to have identified a likely project by mid semester,
so that they can begin working on it. We will provide many suggestions
of possible projects as the class proceeds.
Announcements
Lecture Notes
Sharks and Fish