CSc 422/522 -- Parallel and Distributed Programming

Spring, 2001

Instructor

Greg Andrews
Office: Gould-Simpson 705
Office Hours: Monday 2:30-4:00, Tuesday 3:30-4:30, and by appointment
Email: greg

Teaching Assistants

Bengu Li
Email: libengu

Somasundaram Perianayagam (Somu)
Office Hours (in GS 228): Monday 1:00-2:30 & 4:00-5:00; Wednesday 10:00-11:00
Email: somu

Textbooks

Andrews, Foundations of Multithreaded, Parallel, and Distributed Programming, Addison Wesley, 2000. The book's Web site contains a lot of material you might find useful. The errata page contains several minor corrections as well as a few larger ones.

Andrews and Olsson, The SR Programming Language: Concurrency in Practice, Benjamin/Cummings, 1993. The book is now in its third printing. The major change from the first printing is the addition of Appendix G , which describes a few new language features.

Click on the cover of either book for a larger image.





Syllabus

The syllabus page contains the lecture schedule and information on assignments and due dates.

My lecture notes from last year are also available. However, I have changed the order of some topics and will be using different examples in some lectures. As stated in the syllabus, you are responsible for everything covered in class.

Information on MPD

Visit the MPD Web pages for information about MPD. This includes a tutorial, sample programs, a synopsis of the syntax of the language, information on how to compile and execute MPD programs, and information on the MPD operators and predefined functions.

Source files for the MPD programs in the tutorial are also located in /home/cs522/Programs/mpd.

Information on SR

Source files for several SR programs are located in /home/cs522/Programs/sr. Source files for all the programs in the SR book -- as well as others -- are located in /home/sr/examples.

General information on the SR project can be found on the SR Web page. The source for the entire distribution is located in /home/sr/v2. For those of you who use the Emacs editor, there are SR mode and font-lock files in /home/cs522/emacslib. See the README file for installation instructions. (There is an old SR mode file in /home/sr/v2/sr-mode.el, with installation instructions here .)

Information on Parallel

Parallel is a Sun Microsystems multiprocessor with six 50 MHz SPARC processors and 768M bytes of main memory. Each processor has first-level instruction and data caches and a second-level combined cache. The instruction cache size has 20K bytes and is organized as a five-way set associative cache with 64-byte cache lines (blocks), which are loaded as two contiguous 32-byte lines. The data cache has 16K bytes and is organized as a four-way set associative cache with 32-byte lines. The second-level cache has 1M bytes, with 128 byte cache lines; it is loaded in parallel as four separate (but contiguous) 32-byte lines.

Handouts, Homework, and Exams

Below are links to Postscript and PDF copies of homework assignments and exams as they are given. Copies are also stored in /home/cs522/Handouts. Click here for help viewing Postscript files using Netscape. (You can also use Internet Explorer if the ghostview program has been installed.) Use Adobe Acrobat Reader to view PDF files.

All programming assignments should adhere to the Presentation Points.

Homework 1 -- Postscript or PDF
Homework 2 -- Postscript or PDF
Homework 3 -- Postscript or PDF
Midterm 1 -- Postscript or PDF
Parallel Programming Project -- Postscript or PDF
Homework 4 -- Postscript or PDF
Final Project -- Postscript or PDF
Midterm 2 -- Postscript or PDF