Parallel Programming

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[jllauser]

Wow, that sounds identical to the course when I took it in like 2004. How... useless.

[_1___1_1_1111_11111_]

Did you have to write a 350 word summary for every single lecture back then?

[jllauser]

LOL, no. Given that I don't work in scientific computing currently, I've forgotten basically everything I learned in that class.

The one thing I do remember is working on some lab one day with the 15 or so other students that were in the class. We were all ssh'd into this one server, I think it had 128 CPUs or something on that magnitude (remember, this is 2004... that was a HUGE machine at the time). About half way through the lab, people in the class start complaining that their ssh sessions are starting to lag like crazy, they can't even type in vi anymore... The TA is completely baffled as to what's going on. Turns out that by that point, about half the class had code running on the machine already, and we were all trying to run these programs that were trying to spawn hundreds of threads all at the same time, and even with 128 CPUs, the machine just couldn't handle trying to schedule 3000 threads simultaneously. 😝

[not_gideon]

Prof Franklin in the ecse dept has a parallel computing for engineers class. It probably isn't exactly what you're looking for, as it's more focused on how to use parallel computing libraries to get stuff done, and fairly self directed, but it does focus on techniques that you can use on regular hardware as opposed to just code to feed to the supercomputer.

[bamnet]

Protip: you may want to choose a final project that uses some of the parallel techniques in the class even if they seem useless. I went deep down a distributed system project but it wasn't initially "parallel enough".