Final Grades

Meeting Times: Mondays, Wednesdays, Fridays 11:15 AM - 12:05 PM (3 hours) Gore 102

Instructor: Lori Pollock pollock cis udel edu 436 Smith Hall (831-1953)
Office Hours: 2:30-3:30 Mondays and Wednesdays and by appointment.

Teaching Assistant: Rob Keller, rjk udel edu
Office Hours: Thursdays 3-4:30, 102 Smith

Course Prerequisites

CISC 220 Data Structures

Course Objectives

At the end of this course, the student should be able to:

• DESCRIBE the major functions and approaches to parallelism used in a large parallel program, through program inspection and research on an application domain,
  
• IDENTIFY the regions of a large time-consuming program that are most conducive to increased performance through parallelization,
  
• SELECT and apply appropriate parallelization constructs to a large program to create a correct parallel version to exploit a state-of-the-art parallel computing environment,
  
• ASSESS the correctness of a parallel program,
  
• APPLY available debugging methods to detect and correct errors in an erroneous parallel program,
  
• ASSESS the performance of parallel programs run with different parameters of input sizes and numbers of processors,
  
• VERBALLY AND ORALLY CRITIQUE a parallelization effort and its resulting performance results to non-experts,
  
• COORDINATE and cooperatively participate in a team similar to industrial and government research labs working on a realistic program parallelization problem

Course Topics

• Introduction - What is parallel computing?
• Overview of parallel architectures and parallel programming models
• How do I write a simple parallel program?
• The MIMD and SPMD models
• What are the problems unique to parallel programs?
• How do I deal with these problems?
• How do I debug parallel programs?
• How do I measure the goodness of my parallel program?
• The process of designing good parallel programs:
  • How do I break up the problem?
  • Some basic techniques of parallel algorithm design
  • How do I get processes to pass data around in effective ways?
  • How much overhead have I created for the sake of parallelism?
  • How can I improve the parallel program in terms of communication overhead?
• How do I evaluate the performance of my parallel algorithm/program?

MPI Concepts

• Basic Send and Recv
• Collective Communication
• Work Distribution and Load balancing
• Nonblocking communication
• Advanced Point-to-Point Communication
• Timing and Profiling MPI Programs

Required Textbook

Michael J. Quinn, Parallel Programming in C with MPI and OpenMP, McGraw Hill, 2004.

References

• Ananth Grama, Anshul Gupta, George Karypis, Vipin Kumar, Introduction to Parall el Computing. Second Edition. Addison-Wesley, 2003 (ISBN 0 201 64865 2).
• Kernighan and Ritchie, The C Programming Language, Prentice Hall, 1988.
• Stroustrop, The C++ Programming Languages, Addison Wesley, 1997.
• Deitel and Deitel, C How to Program, Prentice Hall, 1994.
• Snir, Otto, Huss-Lederman, Walker, and Dongarra, MPI The Complete Reference, The MIT Press, 1994.
• William Gropp, Ewing Lusk, and Anthony Skjellum, Using MPI, The MIT Press, 1994.

Programming Environment and Computer Usage

We will write parallel programs primarily using MPI (Message Passing Interface). MPI is a library of routines that allows programs running in parallel to talk to each other, and send data back and forth. These programs will be compiled and executed on a dedicated network of linux PCs on the CIS network. You must obtain an account on this cluster as soon as possible. Go to https://www.eecis.udel.edu/wiki/ececis-docs/index.php/Site/UserAccounts, read the information there about user accounts, and click on "Account Form". Ask for an academic account for MPI parallel programming. Department: CIS; Classification: Undergraduate; Use: for MPI programming on the cluster for cisc 372. ECE-Academic/ECL. Lori as Faculty Contact. If you already have an ECL account, you do not have to reapply. When using the cluster login by ssh to "porsche.cis.udel.edu".

Course Requirements and Grade Weights

• (65%) Laboratory exercises and group projects.
  • (32%) Individual programming exercises
  • (8%) Team Programming Labs
  • (5%) Team case studies of collective communications
  • (20%) Team Experimental Study
    • (3%) Deliverable 1 - Question, Hypothesis, Design
    • (7%) Deliverable 2 - Implementation
    • (5%) Deliverable 3 - Group Oral Presentation
    • (5%) Deliverable 4 - Experiments and Experiment Report
• (5%) Weekly Quizzes
• (15%) First Examination.
• (15%) Second Examination.

Weekly Quizzes

The goals of the weekly quizzes are:

• Reinforce the concepts in recent classes and readings.
• Assess individual student understanding of recent topics/skills.
• Encourage class preparation.

Each quiz will take about 5 minutes at the beginning of class. It will contain 1-2 short questions based on recent class discussions and readings. There will be a quiz every Wednesday, unless announced otherwise. The quiz will focus on the previous week's classroom and reading topics. Each student's lowest two quiz grades will not be counted toward their final grade. Thus, there WILL BE NO MAKEUP quizzes. Any missed quizzes will be count ed as zeros in the grading scheme above. Thus, if you miss more than two quizzes, all additional missed quizzes and all other quiz grades will be counted toward your final grade.

Assignment Submission

Work to be graded must be given to the instructor by the start of class on the due date, in order to have no points deducted for lateness. The due dates are to be taken seriously and you should not expect them to be extended. The pace of work is implicit in the due dates and necessary if you expect to finish by the end of the semester. NO late work will be accepted FOR FULL CREDIT without discussion with me prior to the due date. If you can not reach me, leave a message on my v oicemail or email. All other assignments not delivered by the due date are considered late.

My philosophy on late assignments is: (1) Everyone should try their best to complete all assignments by the specified due date. (2) People who work conscientiously to make the deadlines should be rewarded for their promptness and sacrifice of sleep. Thus, allowing others to hand in late assignments without some penalty is not fair to these people. However, there are various circumstances that may prevent you from completing an assignment by the due date. Allowing no late assignments would not give you much incentive to continue to work on the assignment, which is a major source of learning in this course. Thus, I believe late assignments are better than no assignment.

Late assignments will be penalized 2% off the total possible points if turned in within the first 24-hour period after the specified due date and time, and 5% per 24-hour period (or fraction of a day) (including weekends) after that time, up to a week after the due date. Late assignments will be accepted with penalty up to one week after the due date. Assignments submitted at any later time without an approved excuse will not be accepted. It is up to you to determine the version of your assignment to be graded. You must weigh the late penalty against the completeness of your assignment.

Regrading Policy

If you are dissatisfied with a grade on any work handed in, you should consult the instructor directly within a week of the day the graded assignment was returned to you. No regrade requests will be considered after this week period.

Posting Grades

With your permission, grades will be posted periodically (by your secret code) on the course website. Questions about accuracy of recorded grades should be addressed to me.

Policy on Academic Dishonesty

You are permitted to consult with other students and professors on any conceptual problems and projects designated as group work. You should not be downloading solutions from the internet to be turned in as your own work. Any evidence of collaboration other than this kind will be handled as stated in the Official Student Handbook of the University of Delaware. If you are in doubt regarding the requirements, please consult with me before you complete any requirement of this course.

Email Questions

I have found that the quickest way to resolve ambiguities and answer questions on homework and programming assignments is via email. Any questions sent to pollock@cis will be posted anonymously with an answer via email to the entire class, and on the course Blog. One or more classmates as well as the instructor may offer an answer or expand the discussion.

Handouts

All assignment sheets, deadlines, and readings will be posted on the course web site. Many of the handouts and notes from classtime will not be posted on the website; you may pick up copies of handouts from missed classes in my office during office hours.

Cell phones and Laptop Use

Cell phones and laptops should be turned off throughout classtime. In-class group work may involve some shared laptop use; you will be notified in advance when some laptops will be needed.

Handouts

Peer Evaluation Form for Group Projects

MPI Resources

A Guide to MPI on the UD CIS Linux Cluster

MPICH man pages at Argonne National Laboratory

Resources from Oak Ridge National Laboratory

MPI Standard and other links at Argonne National Laboratory

Graphing and Presentation Resources

Making graphs with MS Excel

Making graphs with MS Word

References

Designing and Building Parallel Programs, by Ian Foster

University of Delaware