Note: The following provides a suggested course description,
objectives, and an outline. These may be modified pending discussion with
the Faculty Chairs, proposing faculty, and other curriculum
reviewers.
Course Description: Parallel processing has matured to
the point where it has begun to make a considerable impact on the computer
marketplace. This course seeks to equip students to specify, design, and
evaluate parallel architectures for special-purpose and general-purpose
applications.
Course Objectives: Introduce students to the concepts
of parallel computing.
Course Outline by Topical Areas:
The course will
begin with discussions of several typical numeric and combinatorial
applications and focus on one or more of them to concretely illustrate the
tradeoffs in application implementation. Students will then be shown how
to classify parallel machines, with a discussion of the issues in
controlling and programming in each class. Then follows a discussion of
general-purpose multiprocessors. This includes a detailed study of
interconnection networks such as hypercube, butterfly, and mesh. A
detailed study of cache coherency procedures for multiprocessors will then
be performed.
