Computer Science Department

CS 475: Parallel Programming
GRAD 510: High Performance Computing
Fall 2007

Class meets: MWF 10:00-10:50 in Military Science 200
Labs meet: M 12:00 - 12:50 or M 2:00 - 2:50 (labs are required)

Announcements:

Watch this space (and the Schedule Page and Lab Schedule Page) for last minute information.

Mon Dec 17 (4:30pm): Grades have been posted. They are based on these raw (and weighted) scores. Please contact Sanjay if you notice any discrepancies.
Fri Dec 14 (2:30pm): Please take a look at your raw (and weighted) scores for all homeworks and midterms. Please contact Sanjay if you notice any discrepancies. The final projects will be graded over the weekend.
Previous Announcements and special announcements for students in GRAD 510

Course Overview

Parallel programming is becoming increasingly critical for a computer scientist/engineer. Tomorrow, all machines are all going to be parallel, and a sequential program will be a slow program. Dave Patterson's keynote talk at LCPC 2006 elquently makes that argument that we are at the end of the "La-Z-Boy Programming" era.

This course will train you to be ready for this challenge. It will teach you the basic concepts of writing, debugging, analyzing, benchmarking, and designing parallel programs. It covers the two main paradigms: shared memory, and message passing. We will also examine a number of parallel algorithms for a range of problems. The class is intended to be very hands-on: you will write a number of programs (in C), run them on the CS department's Unix platforms and on CSU's CoGrid node, measure the running time as a function of two parameters (problem size and number of processors), and write reports on your observations.

Because this class is a capstone course for the undergraduate Computer Science curriculum, there is a significant writing component. This will be in the form of detailed lab reports, and a term paper, for which you will receive critical feedback on your writing and expository skills.

Prerequisites: CS 370 System Architecture and Software or instructor consent. Another key prerequisite is intellectual curiosity.

Tentative Syllabus & Schedule

The tentative schedule of lecture topics, titles and due dates of the Homework and Lab assignments and the associated reading material is posted here. Note that it is tentative and we may not be able to cover all topics. The table will be modified as the course proceeds.

Details

Class meets: Monday, Wednesday, Friday 10:00 to 10:50, in Military Science 200.
Instructor: Sanjay Rajopadhye USC 223, (email: Sanjay.Rajopadhye@colostate.edu), (phone: 491-7323).
Office Hours: Please see Sanjay's weekly schedule.
Graduate Teaching Assistant: DaeGon Kim USC 2nd floor North, Cubicle N2, (email: kim@cs.colostate.edu), (phone: 491-5937).
Office Hours: Tuesday 9-11 (2nd floor) and Friday 12:00-1:00 or by appointment.
Textbook: Parallel Programming in C with MPI and OpenMP, Michael J. Quinn (Mc Graw Hill, 2004 ISBN 0-07-282256-2).
Tentative Grading: Homework/Labs 50%, Midterms 30%, Final Project 20%.
- Most homeworks will be labs involving writing and analyzing programs, both analytically and empirically. Assignments must be submitted at the beginning of class on the due date. Programming assignments must be checked in by the time indicated. Late assignments will not be accepted (exceptions may be announced in class or posted).
- There will be two midterms and a project, but no final exam.
Final Project For your final project, you will work with a partner and parallelize an algorithm of your choice. More on this later.
The university calendar has scheduled the final exam on Tuesday, December 11, 9:10-11:10pm, in the classroom. We do not have a final exam, but your project report will be due on this date at 10:00 am.
Important Information: Be sure to read the Computer Science Department Student Information Sheet. You are expected to be aware of the policies outlined there.