Parallel Computing

CEN 628
With the rise of multi-core architectures, parallel computing is an increasingly important topic for engineers, scientists, software developers, and computer system designers.  This course focuses on the underlying principles and techniques of parallel computation, explains the various phenomena, and explores why these phenomena represent opportunities or barriers to successful use of parallelism. As stated in [1], “the continued drive for higher- and higher-performance systems … leads us to one simple conclusion: the future is parallel”. Further, many experts in the high-tech sector advocate that  developers need to “think parallel” by learning how to best leverage the power of parallelism to develop new applications that can accommodate multicore and many-core CPUs.

[1] M. J. Flynn and K. W. Rudd (March 1996), Parallel Architectures, ACM Computing Surveys, Vol.28, No.1, pp. 67-70.