CISC 372: INTRODUCTION TO PARALLEL PROGRAMMING
Fall 2001
Exam Study Guide
Final Exam Time and Date: course classroom on Friday, Dec 14, 2001, 1-3pm.
- All lectures notes.
(Topical summary on course web page:
http://www.cis.udel.edu/~saunders/courses/372/01f/
- Textbook: Chapters 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 7(thru 7.4), 9, 10, 11, 12,
- Individual Labs, Group Projects.
Format of Exam
The exam is closed book, closed neighbor and you will have
the full two hour 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 form of the questions will be similar to the midterm 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.
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
(Be prepared to discuss what you learned from the group research project.
What more do you know about topologies and parallel programming styles
in view of the various research reports.)
basic MPI program components and format and purpose of each component
standard message passing in MPI: purpose of each field
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 applications: numerical integration, matrix-vector mult., Fox' method.
performance evaluation: Esp. the definitions and uses of the
concepts of speedup, parallel efficiency, scalability. Amdahl's law, etc.
David Saunders 12Dec2001