1 You

After we discuss the syllabus, tell the class about yourself for a minute or two. What would you like to see in this course.

2 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.

   1. Intel CPUs vs Nvidia CUDA cores.

   2. Advantages and disadvantages of shared memory.

   3. OpenMP vs CUDA.

   4. Rate-limiting cost usually I/O not computation.

3 Homework 1

is online, due next Mon.