Assignments
Students will do several programming assignments, possibly a midterm
(to help those students planning to take the CS Parallelism Prelim), and a
final project (a substantial parallel programming project).
Programming assignments and the final project will be done by
``mixed'' teams of 2 or 3 students, where a mixed team has at least
one CS student and one non-CS student. This field is
interdisciplinary, with diverse knowledge of computer science and the
relevant application needed to solve a problem. This is too much for
most individuals to know, so work is typically done by
interdisciplinary teams, and it is therefore important to learn to
work with people in other disciplines. In this spirit, students are
strongly encouraged to change partners for each programming assignment,
in order to get to know as many potential final project partners as possible.
The most important part of the class is the final project. Students are
invited to bring their own applications to parallelize, but I will supply
a list with many suggestions. At the end of the semester we will have
a ``poster session'' where all projects will be presented.
For a look at what previous projects have involved, see the lists on the
class homepage.
Projects have been in all engineering and scientific disciplines.
One project
from the last class, which has been developed considerably since then
by Paul Gauthier and Prof. Eric Brewer, recently received money from
venture capitalists in order to commercialize it.
So many things are possible!
Computing facilties
Parallel and other high performance machines available to the class
include a 32 processor Thinking Machines CM-5, an 8 processor IBM SP-1,
a network of 16 or 32 high performance workstations in Soda Hall (NOW),
a 4-processor SPARCstation-10 at ICSI, and some IBM RS6000/590 workstations.
Class accounts will be made available early in the semester.
You have to be registered to get accounts on these parallel machines.
You are also welcome to use other parallel machines, if they are
available to you.
I assume people have access to workstations somewhere on campus. See me
if this is not the case.
Grading
Grades will be based on homework (25%), midterm (25%), and final
project (50%). If we do not have a midterm, it will be
30% homework and 70% project.
If some students want to form project teams with students in the MIT
class, Alan Edelman and I would welcome this.