Course Description

Prerequisites

CS360

Required/Suggested Textbooks

• Parallel Programming in C with MPI and OpenMP, by Michael J. Quinn, out of print
• An introduction to parallel programming, by Peter S. Pacheco
• Using MPI, Third Edition, by William Gropp, Ewing Lusk and Anthony Skjellum
• Using Advanced MPI Modern Features of the Message-Passing Interface, by William Gropp, Torsten Hoefler, Rajeev Thakur and Ewing Lusk
• Programming Massively Parallel Processors, Third Edition: A Hands-on Approach, by David B. Kirk and Wen-mei W. Hwu

Links

• Why Good Applications Don’t Scale by Jeff Layton gives a review of Amdahl's Law and consequences of scaling efficient sequential programs brought to you by Admin Magazine

Schedule

Monday, Wednesday and Friday from 1:00PM until 1:50PM ET. This year the COSC462 class is held entirely online using the following link Zoom. The password has been sent over email, and can also be found in the class announcement in Canvas.

Grading

• Exam(s) (cumulative) — 35%
• Homework — 40%
• Project — 25%

Suggested tools

• We will use Piazza to benefit from the community-driven approach to questions and answers, where the shared students knowledge is beneficial to all and the instructor simply approve or improve an answer. Each student is encouraged to register and join the class on Piazza (you will be required a password to register with the class in Piazza, use the same password as for the Zoom session). For more information about Piazza capabilities use this and this.
• Homework will be stored and returned using GitHub Classroom. The git flow is described on the document of the first lecture and will be enforced through the entire semester. Each student is expected to have a github id, or to create one at Github, and to strictly follow the requirements. Beware the homework repository is private, we need to have your github id before granting you access.
• For everything else we will rely on the UTK provided service, Canvas.
• For the performance sensitive part of the homework it is necessary to have access to computational resources, such as a cluster. In some cases access to such resources is provided directly by your department, or you might have it through other university related projects. You are free to use the resources available to you. However, the homework submitted in github will be automatically validated by a bot, that will also run your application on a set of resources in my group. You will be provided access to the output, and other files generated during the run.

Lecture Notes

Homework

• Programming projects based on lectures
• Grading
• Correctness
• "Smoke test"
• Correct result
• Stress test for parallelism and/or concurrency issues
• Performance: Absolutely necessary (unless otherwise specified)

Exams

Project

Instructors

Links

• COSC462 in 2017 from George Bosilca and Piotr Luszczek
• COSC462 in 2016 from George Bosilca and Piotr Luszczek
• COSC462 in 2015 by Micah Beck
• COSC462 in 2015 from George Bosilca