COMP 322: Fundamentals of Parallel Programming (Spring 2021)
Instructor: | Mackale Joyner, DH 2063 | Head TAs: | |
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Admin Assistant: | Annepha Hurlock, annepha@rice.edu, DH 3122, 713-348-5186 | Undergraduate TAs: | |
Piazza site: | https://piazza.com/class/khclqrtu2133zo (Piazza is the preferred medium for all course communications) | Cross-listing: | ELEC 323 |
Lecture location: | Fully Online | Lecture times: | MWF 1:30pm - 2:25pm |
Lab locations: | Fully Online | Lab times: | Tu 1:30pm - 2:25pm, Th 4:50pm - 5:45pm |
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.
Course Objectives
The primary goal of COMP 322 is to introduce you to the fundamentals of parallel programming and parallel algorithms, by following a pedagogic approach that exposes you to the intellectual challenges in parallel software without enmeshing you in the jargon and lower-level details of today's parallel systems. A strong grasp of the course fundamentals will enable you to quickly pick up any specific parallel programming system that you may encounter in the future, and also prepare you for studying advanced topics related to parallelism and concurrency in courses such as COMP 422.
The desired learning outcomes fall into three major areas (course modules):
1) Parallelism: 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.
2) Concurrency: critical sections, atomicity, isolation, high level data races, nondeterminism, linearizability, liveness/progress guarantees, actors, request-response parallelism, Java Concurrency, locks, condition variables, semaphores, memory consistency models.
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 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.
Prerequisite
The prerequisite course requirements are COMP 182 and COMP 215. COMP 322 should be accessible to anyone familiar with the foundations of sequential algorithms and data structures, and with basic Java programming. COMP 321 is also recommended as a co-requisite.
Textbooks and Other Resources
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)
- There is no lecture handout for Module 3 (Distribution and Locality). The instructors will refer you to optional resources to supplement the lecture slides and videos.
There 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
Finally, here are some additional resources that may be helpful for you:
- Slides titled "MPI-based Approaches for Java" by Bryan Carpenter
Lecture Schedule
Week | Day | Date (2021) | Lecture | Assigned Reading | Assigned Videos (see Canvas site for video links) | In-class Worksheets | Slides | Work Assigned | Work Due | ||
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1 | Mon | Jan 25 | Lecture 1: Task Creation and Termination (Async, Finish) | Module 1: Section 1.1 | worksheet1 | lec1-slides |
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| Wed | Jan 27 | Lecture 2: Computation Graphs, Ideal Parallelism | Module 1: Sections 1.2, 1.3 | Topic 1.2 Lecture, Topic 1.2 Demonstration, Topic 1.3 Lecture, Topic 1.3 Demonstration | worksheet2 | lec2-slides | Homework 1 |
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Fri | Jan 29 | Lecture 3: Abstract Performance Metrics, Multiprocessor Scheduling | Module 1: Section 1.4 | Topic 1.4 Lecture, Topic 1.4 Demonstration | worksheet3 | lec3-slides |
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2 | Mon | Feb 01 | Lecture 4: Parallel Speedup and Amdahl's Law | Module 1: Section 1.5 | Topic 1.5 Lecture, Topic 1.5 Demonstration | worksheet4 | lec4-slides | Quiz for Unit 1 | |||
| Wed | Feb 03 | Lecture 5: Future Tasks, Functional Parallelism ("Back to the Future") | Module 1: Section 2.1 | Topic 2.1 Lecture, Topic 2.1 Demonstration | worksheet5 | lec5-slides | ||||
| Fri | Feb 05 | Lecture 6: Finish Accumulators | Module 1: Section 2.3 | Topic 2.3 Lecture, Topic 2.3 Demonstration | worksheet6 | lec6-slides | ||||
3 | Mon | Feb 08 | Lecture 7: Map Reduce | Module 1: Section 2.4 | Topic 2.4 Lecture, Topic 2.4 Demonstration | worksheet7 | lec7-slides | Homework 2 | Homework 1 | ||
| Wed | Feb 10 | Lecture 8: Data Races, Functional & Structural Determinism | Module 1: Section 2.5, 2.6 | Topic 2.5 Lecture, Topic 2.5 Demonstration, Topic 2.6 Lecture, Topic 2.6 Demonstration | worksheet8 | lec8-slides |
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| Fri | Feb 12 | Lecture 9: Java’s Fork/Join Library | Module 1: Sections 2.7, 2.8 | Topic 2.7 Lecture, Topic 2.8 Lecture | worksheet9 | lec9-slides | Quiz for Unit 2 | |||
4 | Mon | Feb 15 | Lecture 10: Loop-Level Parallelism, Parallel Matrix Multiplication | Module 1: Sections 3.1, 3.2 | Topic 3.1 Lecture , Topic 3.1 Demonstration , Topic 3.2 Lecture, Topic 3.2 Demonstration | worksheet10 | lec10-slides | ||||
Wed | Feb 17 | Spring "Sprinkle" Day (no class) | |||||||||
| Fri | Feb 19 | Lecture 11: Iteration Grouping (Chunking), Barrier Synchronization | Module 1: Sections 3.3, 3.4 | Topic 3.3 Lecture , Topic 3.3 Demonstration, Topic 3.4 Lecture , Topic 3.4 Demonstration | worksheet11 | lec11-slides | Quiz for Unit 2 | |||
5 | Mon | Feb 22 | Lecture 12: Parallelism in Java Streams, Parallel Prefix Sums | Module 1: Section 3.7 | Topic Topic 3.7 Java Streams, Topic 3.7 Java Streams Demonstration | worksheet12 | lec12-slides | ||||
Wed | Feb 24 | Lecture 13: Iterative Averaging Revisited, SPMD pattern | Module 1: Sections 3.5, 3.6 | Topic 3.5 Lecture , Topic 3.5 Demonstration , Topic 3.6 Lecture, Topic 3.6 Demonstration | worksheet13 | lec13-slides | Homework 3 (includes one intermediate checkpoint) Quiz for Unit 3 | Homework 2 | |||
| Fri | Feb 26 | Lecture 14: Data-Driven Tasks | Module 1: Sections 4.5 | Topic 4.5 Lecture Topic 4.5 Demonstration | worksheet14 | lec14-slides | ||||
6 | Mon | Mar 01 | Spring "Sprinkle" Day (no class) | ||||||||
| Wed | Mar 03 | Lecture 15: Point-to-point Synchronization with Phasers | Module 1: Section 4.2, 4.3 | Topic 4.2 Lecture , Topic 4.2 Demonstration, Topic 4.3 Lecture, Topic 4.3 Demonstration | worksheet15 | lec15-slides | ||||
| Fri | Mar 05 | Lecture 16: Pipeline Parallelism, Signal Statement, Fuzzy Barriers | Module 1: Sections 4.4, 4.1 | Topic 4.4 Lecture , Topic 4.4 Demonstration, Topic 4.1 Lecture, Topic 4.1 Demonstration | worksheet16 | lec16-slides | Quiz for Unit 4 | Quiz for Unit 3 | ||
7 | Mon | Mar 08 | Lecture 17: Midterm Review | lec17-slides | |||||||
| Wed | Mar 10 | Lecture 18: Abstract vs. Real Performance | worksheet18 | lec18-slides | ||||||
| Fri | Mar 12 | Lecture 19: Critical Sections, Isolated construct (start of Module 2) | Module 2: Sections 5.1, 5.2, 5.6, | Topic 5.1 Lecture, Topic 5.1 Demonstration, Topic 5.2 Lecture, Topic 5.2 Demonstration, Topic 5.6 Lecture, Topic 5.6 Demonstration | worksheet19 | lec19-slides | Homework 3, Checkpoint-1 | |||
8 | Mon | Mar 15 | Lecture 20: Parallel Spanning Tree algorithm, Atomic variables | Module 2: Sections 5.3, 5.4, 5.5 | Topic 5.3 Demonstration, Topic 5.4 Lecture, Topic 5.4 Demonstration, Topic 5.5 Lecture, Topic 5.5 Demonstration | worksheet20 | lec20-slides |
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| Wed | Mar 17 | Lecture 21: Actors | Module 2: 6.1, 6.2 | Topic 6.1 Lecture , Topic 6.1 Demonstration , Topic 6.2 Lecture, Topic 6.2 Demonstration | worksheet21 | lec21-slides |
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| Fri | Mar 19 | Lecture 22: Actors (contd) | Module 2: 6.3, 6.4, 6.5 | Topic 6.3 Lecture, Topic 6.3 Demonstration, Topic 6.4 Lecture , Topic 6.4 Demonstration, Topic 6.5 Lecture, Topic 6.5 Demonstration | worksheet22 | lec22-slides | Quiz for Unit 4 | |||
9 | Mon | Mar 22 | Lecture 23: Actors (contd) | Module 2: 6.6 | Topic 6.6 Lecture, Topic 6.6 Demonstration | lec23-slides | Quiz for Unit 5 |
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Wed | Mar 24 | Lecture 24: Java Threads, Java synchronized statement | Module 2: 7.1, 7.2 | Topic 7.1 Lecture, Topic 7.2 Lecture | lec24-slides |
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Fri | Mar 26 | Spring "Sprinkle" Day (no class) | |||||||||
10 | Mon | Mar 29 | Lecture 25: Java Threads, Java synchronized statement (contd), wait/notify | Module 2: 7.1, 7.2 | Topic 7.1 Lecture, Topic 7.2 Lecture | lec25-slides |
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| Wed | Mar 31 | Lecture 26: Java Threads (exercise) | lec26-handout | Homework 3 (all) | ||||||
| Fri | Apr 02 | Lecture 27: Java Locks | Module 2: 7.3 | Topic 7.3 Lecture | lec27-slides | Quiz for Unit 6 | Quiz for Unit 5 | |||
11 | Mon | Apr 05 | Lecture 28: Linearizability of Concurrent Objects | Module 2: 7.4 | Topic 7.4 Lecture | lec28-slides | Homework 4 (includes one intermediate checkpoint) |
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| Wed | Apr 07 | Lecture 29: Java Locks (exercise) | lec29-handout |
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| Fri | Apr 09 | Lecture 30: Safety and Liveness Properties, Java Synchronizers, Dining Philosophers Problem | Module 2: 7.5, 7.6 | Topic 7.5 Lecture, Topic 7.6 Lecture | lec30-slides | Quiz for Unit 7 | Quiz for Unit 6 | |||
12 | Mon | Apr 12 | Lecture 31: Message Passing Interface (MPI), (start of Module 3) | Topic 8.1 Lecture, Topic 8.2 Lecture, Topic 8.3 Lecture | lec31-slides |
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| Wed | Apr 14 | Lecture 32: Message Passing Interface (MPI, contd) | Topic 8.4 Lecture | lec32-slides | Homework 4 Checkpoint-1 | |||||
| Fri | Apr 16 | Lecture 33: Message Passing Interface (MPI, contd) | Topic 8.5 Lecture, Topic 8 Demonstration Video | lec33-slides |
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13 | Mon | Apr 19 | Lecture 34: Task Affinity with Places | lec34-slides | Quiz for Unit 8 | Quiz for Unit 7 | |||||
| Wed | Apr 21 | Lecture 35: Eureka-style Speculative Task Parallelism | lec35-slides |
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| Fri | Apr 24 | Lecture 36: Algorithms based on Parallel Prefix (Scan) operations | lec36-slides |
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14 | Mon | Apr 26 | TBD |
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Wed | Apr 28 | Lecture 38: Course Review (Lectures 19-34) | lec38-slides | Homework 4 (all) | |||||||
Fri | Apr 30 | TBD | Quiz for Unit 8 |
Lab Schedule
Lab # | Date (2021) | Topic | Handouts | Examples |
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0 | Infrastructure Setup | lab0-handout | ||
1 | Jan 26 | Async-Finish Parallel Programming with abstract metrics | lab1-handout | |
- | Feb 02 | No lab this week | ||
2 | Feb 09 | Futures | lab2-handout | |
3 | Feb 16 | Cutoff Strategy and Real World Performance | lab3-handout | |
4 | Feb 23 | DDFs | lab4-handout | |
- | Mar 02 | No lab this week | ||
5 | Mar 09 | Loop-level Parallelism | lab5-handout | lab5-intro |
- | Mar 16 | No lab this week (Spring "Sprinkle" Day) | ||
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| Isolated Statement and Atomic Variables | ||
- | Actors | |||
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| Java Threads, Java Locks | ||
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| Message Passing Interface (MPI) | ||
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| Apache Spark | ||
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| Eureka-style Speculative Task Parallelism | ||
- | Java's ForkJoin Framework |
Grading, Honor Code Policy, Processes and Procedures
Grading will be based on your performance on four homework assignments (weighted 40% in all), two exams (weighted 40% in all), lab exercises (weighted 10% in all), online quizzes (weighted 5% in all), and in-class worksheets (weighted 5% in all).
The purpose of the homework is to give you practice in solving problems that deepen your understanding of concepts introduced in class. Homework is due on the dates and times specified in the course schedule. No late submissions (other than those using slip days mentioned below) will be accepted.
The slip day policy for COMP 322 is similar to that of COMP 321. All students will be given 3 slip days to use throughout the semester. When you use a slip day, you will receive up to 24 additional hours to complete the assignment. You may use these slip days in any way you see fit (3 days on one assignment, 1 day each on 3 assignments, etc.). Slip days will be tracked using the README.md file. Other than slip days, no extensions will be given unless there are exceptional circumstances (such as severe sickness, not because you have too much other work). Such extensions must be requested and approved by the instructor (via e-mail, phone, or in person) before the due date for the assignment. Last minute requests are likely to be denied.
Labs must be submitted by the following Monday at 11:59pm. Labs must be checked off by a TA.
Worksheets should be completed 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.
You will be expected to follow the Honor Code in all homework and exams. The following policies will apply to different work products in the course:
- In-class worksheets: You are free to discuss all aspects of in-class worksheets with your other classmates, the teaching assistants and the professor during the class. You can work in a group and write down the solution that you obtained as a group. If you work on the worksheet outside of class (e.g., due to an absence), then it must be entirely your individual effort, without discussion with any other students. If you use any material from external sources, you must provide proper attribution.
- Weekly lab assignments: You are free to discuss all aspects of lab assignments with your other classmates, the teaching assistants and the professor during the lab. However, all code and reports that you submit are expected to be the result of your individual effort. If you work on the lab outside of class (e.g., due to an absence), then it must be entirely your individual effort, without discussion with any other students. If you use any material from external sources, you must provide proper attribution (as shown here).
- Homework: All submitted homework is expected to be the result of your individual effort. You are free to discuss course material and approaches to problems with your other classmates, the teaching assistants and the professor, but you should never misrepresent someone else’s work as your own. If you use any material from external sources, you must provide proper attribution.
- Quizzes: Each online quiz will be an open-notes individual test. The student may consult their course materials and notes when taking the quizzes, but may not consult any other external sources.
- Exams: Each exam will be a open-book, open-notes, and open-computer individual test, which must be completed within a specified time limit. No external materials may be consulted when taking the exams.
For grade disputes, please send an email to the course instructors within 7 days of receiving your grade. The email subject should include COMP 322 and the assignment. Please provide enough information in the email so that the instructor does not need to perform a checkout of your code.
Accommodations for Students with Special Needs
Students with disabilities are encouraged to contact me during the first two weeks of class regarding any special needs. Students with disabilities should also contact Disabled Student Services in the Ley Student Center and the Rice Disability Support Services.