Course Introduction

Why Parallel Computing?

• In order to improve program performance, we now need to program multi-core machines.
• We want to solve larger and larger problems.
• Single-core machines will be increasingly rare.

Parallel Programming Applications

• Simulation: The Third Pillar of Science
  • Weather Modeling
  • Bioinformatics
  • Energy Research
  • Astrophysics
  • Earthquake Simulation
  • Computational Chemistry
• Data Analysis
• Processor Design
• Search
• Cryptography
• Games

Terminology

• Concurrent computing
• Parallel computing
• Distributed computing

What we'll be doing

• Learning to write explicitly parallel programs.
• Analyzing parallel algorithms.
• Using the C or C++ programming language.
• Using the following libraries/extensions:
  • Posix threads (pthreads)
  • OpenMP
  • Message-Passing Interface (MPI)