NOTE: The class this year will be involved in a supercomputing productivity study.
Advanced interdisciplinary introduction to applied parallel computing on modern supercomputers. Numerical topics include dense and sparse linear algebra, N-body problems, multigrid, fast-multipole, wavelets and Fourier transforms. Geometrical topics include partitioning and mesh generation. Other topics include applications oriented architecture, software systems, MPI, Cilk, data parallel systems, Parallel MATLAB, caches and vector processors with hands-on emphasis on understanding the realities and myths of what is possible on the world's fastest machines.
One emphasis for this course will be VHLLs or very high level languages for parallel computing. Are we there yet?
Lecture 1: 2006 (or 2007?): The year of the high level Parallel Language
Lecture 2: Parallel Matlab with Star-P
Lecture 3: Message Passing (yuck)
The first assignment, not yet with a due date, is to pick a topic of
interest for your final project. Ideally have some code partialy
written in a high level language, or decide that you wish to use C/MPI
or Fortran/MPI, and we can interface it to star-p.
Also every year there are one or two hardware projects which is
another choice if of interest. Okay to take something from you own
research, and okay if already written for starters. We are going to
explore connecting what you are doing to very high level languages.
2/13/2006 8:00PM
You will need to hand in 2 progress reports, and a final project report. Also, you are required to do two presentations on the project, one before Spring break when you hand in your first progress report, and one at the end of the semester. Also you need to keep a website on your project. All reports and the website will be made public and archived.