This course attacks the complexity of programming for fine-grained parallelism in architectures such as multicore, manycore, and GPUs through the power of the polyhedral framework. Compilers use the polyhedral framework to represent loop computations and express schedules and storage mappings for such computations. This approach enables the orthogonal specification of computation and implementation details such as parallel schedules.

The summer 2012 edition of this class will be special in a number of respects.

1. It will be intense. We are cramming a full semester of work into 4 weeks, and this is a 4 credit class. You should expect to spend about 40 hours per week working on this material outside class.

2. One of our main targets will be application-specific-hardware in BlueSpec, a modern language used for High Level Synthesis (HLS).

   Note that the goal is not to teach you BlueSpec or HLS, but to help you develop the skills.

   For students without an interest/aptitude/background in HLS, the target witll be either CUDA or OpenMP.

3. Third, most of the material will be based off the Spring 2011 offering of this class, which includes the class notes/slides, as well as prerecorded lectures.

4. As a consequence of this and the small class size, we will reverse the standard pedagogy. Instead of the instructor giving lectures during class time, students will study the lectures outside the class, and use the "lecture meeting" time to focus more of review and problems solving. The three hours of the "lecture time" will therefore be organized as follows:
   • Hour 1: Two-person stuudent teams will present the material for the day (covering roughly two lectures from Spring 2011).
     The slides for the talk should be submitted the the instructor least 24 hours in advance in order to provide feedback.
     Students should meet with the instructor during the previous office hours to discuss their presentation.

   • Hour 2: The instructor will clarify the material, present additional details, answer and pose questions.

   • Hour 3: Students will work on the homework/assignment problems posed. The instructor will be available to answer questions.

The Course Logo is from Wikimedia Commons and is an out of copyright picture by Neville W. Cayley (1887-1950).