PAR Class 1, Wed 2018-01-17

Source

  1. Read the syllabus.
  2. Read https://computing.llnl.gov/tutorials/parallel_comp/ for an intro to parallel computing.
  3. Some points:
    1. Physics limits to processor speed.
    2. History of Nvidia.
    3. Intel CPUs vs Nvidia CUDA cores.
    4. Advantages and disadvantages of shared memory.
    5. OpenMP vs CUDA.
    6. Rate-limiting cost usually I/O not computation.
  4. Think about these questions for next week.
    1. Answer the following questions.
      1. Why have machine cycle speeds stopped increasing?
      2. What architectures do the top 3 machines on the Top 500 list use?
      3. Which one of the following 4 choices are most GPUs: SISD, SIMD, MISD, MIMD.
      4. Which one of the following 4 choices are most current multicore CPUs: SISD, SIMD, MISD, MIMD.
      5. Per Amdahl's law, if a program is 10% sequential and 90% parallelizable, what is the max speed up that can be obtained with an infinite number of parallel processors?
    2. Try your account on geoxeon.ecse.rpi.edu, which I will set up soon with your RCSid. Change your password.
    3. Look at the file on parallel called /home/parallel/whole2015.txt.gz . It is a CSV file listing stats for all yellowcab taxi rides in NYC in 2015. Use whatever legal tools you prefer to exclude obvious errors and then find the most common hour of the day for routes that are longer than the average. Describe your method.