1   Material

1. Read the syllabus.
2. Read https://computing.llnl.gov/tutorials/parallel_comp/ for an intro to parallel computing.
3. Some points:
   1. Parallel computing is decades old; there were commercial machines in the 1980s. I directed two PhD theses in parallel geometry then. However, then, clocks speeds were increasing so serial machines were more interesting.
   2. Now: physics limits to processor speed.
   3. History of Nvidia.
      1. Curtis Priem had designed graphics HW for both IBM and Sun Microsystems. (For awhile Sun was THE Unix workstation company. They used open standards and had the best price / performance.)
      2. Nvidia designed gaming graphics accelerators...
      3. that just happened to be parallel coprocessors...
      4. that started to be used for nongraphics parallel processing because of their value.
      5. Nvidia noticed that and added more capability, e.g., double precision IEEE floats, to serve that market.
      6. Currently, some of the highest performance Nvidia boards cannot even do graphics because they don't have video out ports.
   4. Intel CPUs vs Nvidia CUDA cores.
   5. Advantages and disadvantages of shared memory.
   6. OpenMP vs CUDA.
   7. Rate-limiting cost usually I/O not computation.
4. Think about these 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   Recently obsoleted parallel tech

1. Intel Xeon Phi
2. IBM BlueGene

3   Computer

1. parallel.ecse accounts
   1. I'll set yours soon.
   2. Play with them. I recomend connecting with ssh.

4   My research

I do parallel geometry algorithms on large problems for CAD and GIS. See my home page. If this is interesting, talk to me. Maybe you can do something that leads to a jointly-authored paper.