Computer Science 335
Parallel Processing and High Performance Computing

Fall 2026, Siena University

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Agenda

• Announcements
  • Grading update (Lab 1, Project 1)
  • Programming Project 2: Jacobi Iteration in C due Friday
  • We'll start working our way through material covered in Pacheco Ch. 3, please get started on reading the first section
• Repository reminder: make sure you don't add/commit/push executables, object files, core files, Emacs backup files
• Discussion of Programming Project 1: Introduction to Jacobi Iteration [PDF]
  • for high-performance computing, especially as we move to C, we will want to think about the balance between a very detailed object-oriented decomposition of the problem, and the efficiency of a simple, direct implementation
• Lab 2: Chapter 2 Questions [HTML] [PDF] discussion
• Other questions/discussion of Chapter 2 readings?
• Q&A/work time on ongoing tasks

Terminology

• vonNeumann architecture: main memory, central processing unit/processor/core, interconnection,
• registers, program counter, bus, fetch/read, store/write
• vonNeumann bottleneck
• operating system
• process
• call stack, heap
• multitasking, time slicing
• blocking
• threading
• fork, join
• single-program multiple data (SPMD)
• task parallel
• load balancing
• parallelization
• embarrassingly parallel
• shared vs. private memory
• static vs. dynamic (pop-up) threads
• nondeterminism
• race condition
• critical section
• mutual exclusion
• mutex lock
• serialization
• busy waiting
• thread safety
• distributed memory
• message passing
• speedup
• efficiency
• Amdahl's law
• scalability