Course Information
What's new?May 15: Homework 4 is assigned, covering Chapters 7 thru 9 and related material covered in class. It is due May 24 and is worth 30 points.May 14: There are now some demo Matlab applications of the 2D-FFT for image filtering and pattern matching on bluegrit. I installed Matlab on bluegrit, and you should be able to run them from there. Try the commands cd /home/motteler/parpro/image /bluegrit/data/motteler/matlabR14.3/bin/matlab -nojvmand then type "test1" for the simple filtering demo or "test5" for the pattern-matching demo. For both demos just press "return" for successive steps, or control-C to exit the script. May 8: Here are some example programs from another text. The pthreads barrier example given in class is from the matrix summation demo. Example Matlab and C sequential implementations of the FFT are available for you to use as a starting point on project 3. The link to project 3 test data works now, but does not include the biggest dataset, with N=2^24. That data is available on bluegrit in /home/motteler/parpro/fft. Here is a Matlab example giving a basic demonstration of the FFT for translation from time to frequency domains, with scaling for an arbitrary time step and point set.
What's old?May 3: By consensus the final exam has been dropped, with proportionally more weight give to homework, projects, and the midterm. Students taking the course as 483 will now get a 40 point bonus, still 10% of the total. Coursework is now divided up as follows.
May 1: Project 3, doing a big FFT with pthreads, is assigned and is due Monday May 22. April 26: Homework 3 is assigned, covering Chapters 5 thru 7 and related material convered in class. It is due May 8 and is worth 25 points. Today we will begin Chapter 8, on programming with shared memory. April 12: Big-endian data for the 16384-body test is available now on bluegrit, in /home/motteler/parpro/nbody; see the README there for more info. This coming Monday we will finish the SIMD examples and start Chapter 7, on load balancing. April 6: As announced in class, the due date for Project 2 has been extended to Wednesday April 19. The link to test dataworks now, see the README in the tar archive for more information. This data is also available on bluegrit in /home/motteler/parpro/nbody Note that if you are using the matlab scripts nbody.m and mkbod.m to generate test data for the bluegrit cluster, make sure you get a recent version that sets the data to big-endian in both scripts, or change these lines yourself,
wtype = 'ieee-be'; % for IBM Power PCThe project specification has been extended slightly to include specification of non-default input and output files. The command line options (also updated in the project spec) are now:
-k m run for m steps, default value 20 -t dT set the time increment to dT, default value 0.005 -g G specify a gravitational constant G, default value 1 -i fin specify an input file name, default nbod_init.dat -o fout specify an output file name, default nbod_last.datApril 3: Project 2 a version of the N-body problem is assigned and is worth 60 points. We will review exam 1, discuss project 2, and if time permits begin Chapter 5, on pipelined computation. March 10: Exam 1 is scheduled for Wednesday, March 29. March 9: Homework 2 is assigned, covering Chapters 3, part of 4, and 11. It is due March 17 and is worth 20 points. Feb 27: I added some more test data for project 1. On Monday we will finish Chapter 3, review homework 1, review the project assignment, and start on Chapter 11 of your text. We should finish Chapter 11 this week. Feb 22: Project 1 is assigned, and is due Wed 8 March. HW1 is due today, by midnight. Feb 20: This week we will cover Chapter 3, and we will also look at section 11.2 of Chapter 11 on matrix multiplication, some of which has been covered already. The directory for class material on bluegrit and the blades is /home/motteler/parpro. There are two demos there: the first is the very simple demo presented in class, and the second a demo that Zach may have also mailed you. There are README files for each with detailed instructions on getting them to run. The flops directory contains a short benchmark program you can use for homework 1 problem M2. Feb 15: Homework 1, covering Chapters 1 and 2, is assigned. It is due 22 Feb 06 and is worth 20 points. Feb 12: We will cover Chapter 2 this week. Some SIMD notes and example code , including the matrix multiply example from class last Wednesday, are now online Feb 5: We will finish Chapter 1 this week. By consensus, the point schedule from the syllabus has been modified to drop the review paper and add the 50 points for that to the "homework" category. Students taking the course as 483 still get the 50 point bonus. Coursework is now divided up as follows.
Jan 30: We will cover material from Chapter 1 of your text this week. Jan 30: Welcome to Parallel and Distributed Processing! This page will be updated regularly with class announcements, projects, assignments, current readings, examples, and other course information.
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