COMP 322: Fundamentals of Parallel Programming (Spring

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2024)

Course Syllabus

A summary PDF file containing the course syllabus for the course can be found here.  Much of the syllabus information is also included below in this course web site, along with some additional details that are not included in the syllabus.

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The desired learning outcomes fall into three major areas (course modules):

1) Parallelism: functional programming, Java streams, creation and coordination of parallelism (async, finish), abstract performance metrics (work, critical paths), Amdahl's Law, weak vs. strong scaling, data races and determinism, data race avoidance (immutability, futures, accumulators, dataflow), deadlock avoidance, abstract vs. real performance (granularity, scalability), collective & point-to-point synchronization (phasers, barriers), parallel algorithms, systolic algorithms.

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3) Locality & Distribution: memory hierarchies, locality, cache affinity, data movement, message-passing (MPI), communication overheads (bandwidth, latency), MapReduce, accelerators, GPGPUs, CUDA, OpenCL.

To achieve these learning outcomes, each class period will include time for both instructor lectures and in-class exercises based on assigned reading and videos.  The lab exercises will be used to help students gain hands-on programming experience with the concepts introduced in the lectures.

To ensure that students gain a strong knowledge of parallel programming foundations, the classes and homeworks homework will place equal emphasis on both theory and practice. The programming component of the course will mostly use the  Habanero-Java Library (HJ-lib)  pedagogic extension to the Java language developed in the  Habanero Extreme Scale Software Research project  at Rice University.  The course will also introduce you to real-world parallel programming models including Java Concurrency, MapReduce, MPI, OpenCL and CUDA. An important goal is that, at the end of COMP 322, you should feel comfortable programming in any parallel language for which you are familiar with the underlying sequential language (Java or C). Any parallel programming primitives that you encounter in the future should be easily recognizable based on the fundamentals studied in COMP 322.

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There are no required textbooks for the class. Instead, lecture handouts are provided for each module as follows.  You are expected to read the relevant sections in each lecture handout before coming to the lecture.  We will also provide a number of references in the slides and handouts.The links to the latest versions of the lecture handouts are included below:

• Module 1 handout (Parallelism)
• Module 2 handout (Concurrency)

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There are also a few optional textbooks that are also a few optional textbooks that we will draw from during the course.  You are encouraged to get copies of any or all of these books.  They will serve as useful references both during and after this course:

• Fork-Join Parallelism with a Data-Structures Focus (FJP) by Dan Grossman (Chapter 7 in Topics in Parallel and Distributed Computing)
• Java Concurrency in Practice by Brian Goetz with Tim Peierls, Joshua Bloch, Joseph Bowbeer, David Holmes and Doug Lea
• Principles of Parallel Programming by Calvin Lin and Lawrence Snyder
• The Art of Multiprocessor Programming by Maurice Herlihy and Nir Shavit

Lecture Schedule

Lab Schedule

Grading, Honor Code Policy, Processes and Procedures

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Labs must be submitted by the following Monday at 11:59pm3pm.  Labs must be checked off by a TA.

Worksheets should be completed by the deadline listed in Canvas before the start of the following class (for full credit) so that solutions to the worksheets can be discussed in the next class.

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