6.846 Parallel
Computing (H)
Spring 2010
Stellar
Website (for paper distribution and homework submission)
Course News and Announcements
- May 6, 2010: HW5 solutions has been posted to stellar.
- May 4, 2010: Please note the class with project presentations will be held at the following time and location on 5/11 and 5/13: Time: 2:30-5. Location: MIT Stata Center Building 32 Gates Tower 8th floor Room 882. The presentation will start at 2:30. Everyone is required to be there during class time (2:30 - 4).
- May 2, 2010: An updated copy of HW4 solutions has been posted to stellar.
- May 1, 2010: Course Evals are now open and comments / reviews would be greatly appreciated.
- Apr 30, 2010: Project Presentation Guidelines have been posted.
- Apr 27, 2010: Jeremy Kepner came by today to discuss job opportunities, his email is: Kepner@ll.mit.edu.
- Apr 21, 2010: HW5: Cache Studies has been posted. This homework is optional with a due date of May 6th.
- Apr 13, 2010: HW3 solutions have been posted. The Project Update is due today.
- Apr 6, 2010: Homework 3 is due today. Homework 4 has been posted. Project updates due in a week.
Also, an updated lab document has been created with information about using pthreads on the TilePro64.
- Mar 30, 2010: Here is
an udpated schedule for the rest of the
term.
- Mar 30, 2010: There will be a mid-term project update (1 page) for each
group due April 13th. This should include describe the progress you've
made at that point (including any numbers if relevant) as well as a
description of the remaining pieces to be done. Also, homework 3 due in 1
week.
- Mar 18, 2010: Project proposals due today.
HW2 Solutions have been posted. HW3:
Multicore Processor Analysis has been posted and is due April 6th.
- Mar 9, 2010: There will be a project team meetup meeting on Thursday
Mar 11 at 4pm after class (in the lecture room). Please show up to this if
you have any ideas for a project or are looking for a group member.
- Mar 2, 2010: HW1
solutions have been posted to stellar. Homework 2 is due in 1 week (Mar 9,
2010). Also, begin thinking about final project and teams. The final project
proposal is due Mar 18, 2010.
- Feb 23, 2010: A quick note on managing the queue. If you would like to see
a list of the current jobs in the queue use the command 'qstat'. If you'd like
to kill one of your own jobs, use the command 'qdel [job_id]' where the job_id
can be obtained from the qstat command.
- Feb 21, 2010: Homework 1 will be due next Tuesday at 11:59pm. Please use
the
stellar website to submit your homework writeup. The website
has the whole class list in it, so you should be able to login. If
you cannot login please let us know. You can also submit your
paper copy in class if you prefer that.
- Feb 8, 2010: If you have signed up on the sign-up sheet as taking for
credit, you should be able to login on the class machine
mosaic.csail.mit.edu with your athena account and password now. We
currently have not created accounts for listeners. If you cannot login
please let us know.
- Feb 4, 2010: The class mailing list has been created. If you did not get
a welcome email, please email the staff your handle to have your email and
machine account created. For those of you who did not get a copy of the
handouts, you will get them next Tuesday. In the meantime, you can also
come to the outside of 32-G742 to pick them up.
F.A.Q.
When I try to execute my program on mosaic, I get the following message,
what's wrong?
[shepherd] WARNING: Cannot execute 'run'.
Answer: Please remove the space between "--" and "run".
I am using printf to debug my program, but I am not getting any
output?
Answer: It might be the situation that printf are written to its
buffer but not flushed to screen. Please add a "\n" in your printf
to flush it out.
General Course Info
Course webpage:
http://courses.csail.mit.edu/6.846/
Meeting Times:
Tuesday & Thursday, 2:30-4pm in room 4-237
Prerequisite:
6.004 or permission of instructor
Units: 3-0-9,
H-level grad credit
Staff
Lecturer
- Prof. Anant Agarwal, 32-G782, x3-1448, agarwal at cag dot csail dot mit dot edu
- Office Hours: By appointment
Teaching Assistants
- Justin (Zhunping) Zhang, 32-G785, zhunping@csail.mit.edu
- Office Hours: T 4:30-5:30pm 32-G631, R
4:30-5:30pm 32-G531
- Charles Gruenwald, 32-G742, cg3 [at] csail [dot] mit [dot] edu
- Office Hours: MW 1-2pm 32-G742
Administrative Staff
Handouts
If there is no link to a handout, it is not available electronically. You
can get hard copy from Justin, Charles, or Cree in their offices.
Final Project
The final project consists of two parts. The Project Proposal is a 1-page
document describing the project idea, group members as well as the division of
labor. This portion will be due Mar 18, 2010. The actual project will require a
demonstration to one of the TA's demonstrating that the project works, a copy
of the source code as well as a presentation given to the class during the last
week of class.
The project may be on the assigned problem (detailed information provided below)
or a project of your chosing. There are several resources for projects to work on
including research students in CSAIL. Please contact the TAs if you are interested
in pursuing one of these.
Teams of 3 are preferred, however teams of 2 or 1 will be allowed. In a team
based project an evaluation of different approaches to a parallel application
can be provided by dividing the methods between team members. Examples include
implementing the same applications using many programming styles. Implement
the same application using different partitioning methods. Implement different
algorithms for the same problem.
Project Ideas
Parallel apps
- Imaging, video, speech, learning, sorting, networking, particle
- E.g., Write parallel filters for images, then do object recognition
- Write app using multiple styles -- stream, msgs, shared memory
- Implement FFT using different communication patterns
- Implement a particle based behavioral algorithm (i.e. boids) in parallel
Parallel programming languages and methods
- Port existing language -- Erlang, OpenMP, MapReduce, Google Go
- Develop implementation of MCAPI based on pthreads or sockets or iLib
Sponsored Projects
- Multicore Distributed Hash Table using Message Passing (cg3)
- Boids (cg3)
- Architectural Simulation using the Graphite Simulator (cg3)
- Application Heartbeats (hank)
- Cache Coloring (hank)
- Smartlocks / ML Adaptive Learning (jon)
- Cilk on Tilera (Justin)
Design Contest
The design contest is intended for those that do not have a project of their
own. The details of this contest are povided in this presentation: Design Contest.
References
Pthreads tutorial
online
Sample pthreads programs