Computer Science 338 Parallel Processing Williams College Spring 2006

Course Information: [Complete Syllabus] [Tutorial Meeting and Reading Schedule, Assignments]

Texts

The main text is Parallel Programming in C with MPI and OpenMP, by Michael J. Quinn (McGraw-Hill, 2004, ISBN 0-07-282256-2). There will be readings from this book and from current and historically significant literature. You may also wish to dig out your copy of The C Programming Language, Second Edition, by Kernighan and Ritchie (Prentice Hall, 1988), as you will be programming in C. A reference text, Gropp, Lusk, and Skjellum's Using MPI, Portable Parallel Programming with the Message-Passing Interface, second edition, (MIT Press, 1999, ISBN 0-262-57134-X) will be available in the lab and from Schow as an eBook. Search in FRANCIS for more information.

Course News

• We made it. Thank you for a great semester!
• Final project information will soon be available on a link from my home page.
• Example code can be found on the CSLab Unix systems under /usr/cs-local/share/cs338/examples.
• If you must log into the nodes of the Bullpen Cluster (rivera, wetteland, etc) or Dhanni Cluster (dhanni1, dhanni2, ... dhanni7) to debug a parallel program interactively, please reserve the nodes you need with a PBS script before logging into the nodes. You may use dhanni8 interactively without reserving it. All other nodes are intended for use only by PBS batch jobs, and other processes may interfere with timing results.

Related Information and Links

• Got a group? See the instructions to use Unix groups.
• New to C or to Unix? Take a look at the notes from a recent version of CSCI-010, C, Unix, and Software Tools, the Winter Study course.
• In addition to the regular FreeBSD lab, we'll be using some genuine parallel computers, many of which are just smaller versions of the fastest supercomputers in the world today.
  • The Bullpen Cluster, located here in the department, consisting of Sun Microsystems Sparc-based servers running Solaris 8.
  • The Dhanni cluster, also located here in the department, consisting of Dell multiprocessor servers running Linux and FreeBSD.
• Telnet is bad! Get and use a secure shell client if you plan to work remotely. A free one for windows can be found here. This is important, since ftp and telnet are no longer allowed to CSLab systems.
• Relevant web sites: [MPI Home Page] [NCSA] [Sun Microsystems] [Top 500 Supercomputers]
• Less relevant, but more fun: [Dilbert] [Fox Trot] [Get Fuzzy] [User Friendly]
• Relevant, but hopefully not needed: The Williams College Honor System