CISC 367: INTRODUCTION TO PARALLEL PROGRAMMING
Spring 1998
Midterm Exam Study Guide
Midterm Time and Date: classtime on Tuesday, March 24, 1998

References

- Lectures notes from start of course through March 19.
- Textbook: Chapters 1, 2, 3, 4, 9, 11.
- Beginner's Guide to MPI on the University of Delaware DEC Alpha Cluster, sections 1, 2, 3, 5.1, 5.2, 6.1.
- Labs 1 and 2.

Topic Coverage

- paradigms of parallel computing: data parallel, task parallel, pipelining
- parallel architectures: fine grain parallelism in a uniprocessor, SIMD, vector machines, array processors, MIMD, uniform shared memory, nonuniform shared memory, distributed memory, distributed shared memory
- SPMD versus MIMD style programming
- interconnection networks: topologies and advantages and disadvantages
- basic MPI program components and format and purpose of each component
- standard message passing in MPI: purpose of each field
- message passing models: blocking versus nonblocking, synchronous versus asynchronous, combinations and their semantics
- problems in parallel programming: deadlock, nondeterminism and races, load imbalance, communication overhead versus computation per process: what are these problems, symptoms, causes, approaches to dealing with them
- example application: numerical integration
- performance evaluation

Format of Exam

The exam is closed book, closed neighbor and you will have the full class period to work. You will be given a list of MPI commands with their parameters for reference. In general, the exam will be a combination of testing your basic knowledge and understanding of the concepts covered in class and application of the concepts. The questions will be of the form:

- Short answer.
- Briefly describe a parallel algorithm for a particular problem, using a particular paradigm of parallel computing.
- Explain what will happen when a particular code segment is executed.
- Write a short (5-10) line MPI program, given a list of MPI commands with parameters.

The questions are NOT true/false or multiple choice. Instead, partial credit will be given when possible on any question in the exam.

How to Study

Review your lecture notes, labs, and textbook chapters. Rewrite some of the simple programs on your own, given a specification of what the program is supposed to do.

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