Lecture 4

Lecture 4: Java Threads; Decomposition Methods, Basics of Critical Sections
Date: Wednesday, September 16, 2026

Agenda

Announcements
- Upcoming due dates
  - Programming Project 1: Introduction to Jacobi Iteration [PDF] due Friday
  - Lab 1: Java Threads Practice [HTML] [PDF], let's see how far we get today, hopefully can finish up by tomorrow
  - Read Pacheco Ch. 2 by early next week
    - 2.1 gives some essential background about computer organization
    - you can just skim 2.2, which is all about interesting topics but not essential to our parallel programming focus
    - we already talked about some of the key ideas in 2.3, and we will not talk about and you will not be responsible for any of the interconnection network details or cache coherence
    - 2.4 previews approaches we will study in more detail
    - 2.5 is short and important to think about
    - 2.6 and 2.7 cover important topics we'll talk about soon, read this more carefully
    - 2.8 and 2.9 are some quick tips about parallel programming that will become useful when we switch to C
    - 2.10 is a summary, focus only on the material related to sections we focused on
Bag of tasks and the basics of critical sections
Lab 1: Java Threads Practice [HTML] [PDF]
- we will continue working through in class as a group
- when we have finished the in-class coding tasks, your remaining work will be to perform some timings and answer questions in the README.md of your repository

Terminology