U.C. Berkeley CS267 Home Page

Applications of Parallel Computers

Spring 2016

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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 the Designated Emphasis ("graduate minor") in Computational Science and Engineering.

While this general outline remains, a large change in the computing world started in the mid 2000's: not only are the fastest computers parallel, but nearly all computers are becoming 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 is 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 ASPIRE project, and its predecessor the ParLab. A summary of the ParLab's research agenda, accomplishments, and remaining challenges may be found 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.

Asking Questions

Outside of lecture, you are welcome to bring your questions to office hours (posted at the top of this page). If you cannot physically attend office hours, you may contact the instructor team via the instructor email. For students registered for the course at UC Berkeley, we encourage you to post your questions to the CS267 Piazza page (you need to sign up first). If you send a question to the instructor email, we may answer your question on Piazza if we think it might help others in the class. Students registered for version of the course being offered by XSEDE should sign up on Moodle for their on-line questions. During lecture students who are viewing remotely can send questions via either email or chat to instructor email, which the teaching assistants will be monitoring during lecture. Depending on the question, the teaching assistants will either answer by email, or ask the instructor to answer during the lecture. You will also submit homeworks via the instructor email; please check with assignment-specific submission instructions first.

Class Projects

You are welcome to suggest your own class project, but you may also look at the following sites for ideas:

Announcements

Class Resources and Homework Assignments.

Lecture Notes and Video

Sharks and Fish