Course Details

1. Justify the need and classify parallel processing systems using Flynns taxonomy as well as other factors such and memory and programming models.
2. Explain the use of the hardware and software components needed to build a shared memory and a message passing system, and explain how issues such as synchronization, memory consistency and cache coherence can be handled.
3. Describe and compare the different types of interconnects such as busses, crossbar switches, multistage switches and networks found in parallel processing systems.
4. Evaluate the performance of a parallel processing system, identify and analyse the sources of lose of performance and propose techniques to improve it.
5. Write efficient programs for message passing and shared memory parallel processing platforms using MPI and OpenMP.
6. Review, present and evaluate published information related to the forefront of parallel computer architecture.

Advanced topics in parallel computer architectures and processing. Introduction to Parallel Processing: Historic evolution and motivation for parallel processing, parallel computer models and classification.

Parallel Programming: Message passing programming using MPI, and shared memory programming using OpenMP.

Performance Metrics: Workloads and benchmarks. Performance monitoring and tuning.

Interconnection Networks: Communication performance, interconnection organization, links, switches and interconnection topologies. Networks-on-Chip.

Shared Memory Multiprocessors: The cache coherence problem, memory consistency and replication, synchronization mechanisms.

Large scale parallel systems: Networks of Workstations, Clusters and Massively Parallel Computers.

Uniprocessor Parallel Microarchitectures: Thread Level Parallelism, Multithreading, superscalar, VLIW and vector processors.

Chip Multiprocessors, many-core processors, threaded dataflow and tiled microarchitectures and heterogeneous systems.  

• Paterson, Hennessy, Computer Architecture: a Qualitative Approach, Morgan Kaufman, 2010

• Students are expected to consult a variety of information sources, including processor manuals, and scientific and research papers.

Students are taught the course material through lectures by means of electronic presentation slides. Homework problems are assigned to strengthen students’ knowledge and understanding.