ECE 1747H Parallel Programming

Instructor:

Cristiana Amza
BA 5287
(416) 946-0299
amza@eecg.toronto.edu

Location:

BA 4164

Class time:

Monday 4:00-6:00 PM

Project List:

project_suggestions.txt

Office Hours:

Thursday, Friday (Sept 25,26)

BA 5287 11:30a.m.-7p.m.


Class Project Description 


Overview

This course is an intermediate graduate course in the area of parallel programming. In the first part of the course we will briefly introduce the architecture of parallel systems and the concept of data dependencies/races. The three most commonly used parallel programming paradigms (shared memory, distributed memory and data parallel) will  then be examined in detail. An overview of automatic parallelization of programs and the use of parallel processing in related domains such as parallel and distributed database transaction processing will also be given. 
In the second part of the course selected research topics will be examined. This part of the course consists of student-lead discussions of relevant research papers.  A research-intensive group project in an area related to program parallelization is a fundamental part of the course.  The projects can be done individually or in small teams of two or three people. The project outcome will be presented in a class session at the end of the semester. A list of suggested research projects has been posted (project_suggestions.txt). Students are also encouraged to propose their own projects and discuss them with me. Please also read:
Class Goals and Advice from Instructor 

Grading

  • Research paper presentation - 10%
  • Research paper summaries - 10%
  • Assignments - 10% each (expect 1 or 2)
  • Class participation - 10%
  • Project report and presentation - remaining %

Textbooks and Pre-requisites

There is no required textbook for the class. You should be fine with the lectures and papers posted on this site. However, here are some suggestions for additional reading:

Parallel Programming in C with MPI and OpenMP
by Michael J. Quinn

Threads Primer: A Guide to Multithreaded Programming
by Bil Lewis, Daniel J. Berg

Concurrency Control and Recovery in Database Systems
by Philip A. Bernstein, Vassos Hadzilacos, Nathan Goodman (free on-line edition you can download from http://research.microsoft.com/pubs/ccontrol/ in .pdf)

It would be good for you if you had basic understanding of operating system principles, basic architecture and some knowledge of network programming. These are not strict pre-requisites though, most of the necessary material will be covered in class.

Help for Project

Sample project report: Link to Sample Project Report.

Help for Programming Assignments

Pthread program examples have been posted here: Code Examples. Please also consult this pthread How to use guide and this pthread reference manual

Programming Assignments

Schedule

Date

Topic

Reading

Assignment
Due Dates

Handouts

Sep 14

Intro and project suggestion Slides-part1 Slides-part2

 

 

 

Sep 21

Parallel Programming and Optimizations Pthreads OpenMP Slides

 

 

 

Sept 28

Parallel Programming and Optimizations Project ideas: TM/Games

Ahmed Abdelkhalek and Angelos Bilas. Parallelization and performance of interactive multiplayer game servers. In Proc. of the 18th International Parallel and Distributed Processing Symposium  (IPDPS 2004), April 2004  quake-parallel-ipdps04.pdf    Matthew Misler


Jin Chen, Baohua Wu, Margaret Delap, Bjorn Knutsson, Honghui Lu and Cristiana Amza,
ACM SIGPLAN Symposium on Principles and Practice of Parallel Programming (PPoPP 2005),  June 2005 load-management-ppopp05.pdf.    
Don Pinto

 

Paper summaries

 

Oct

5

 

 

 

Lock Synchronization and Optimization, Distributed Applications and Environments

 

 John M. Mellor-Crummey and Michael L. Scott. Algorithms for scalable synchronization on shared-memory multiprocessors. ACM Transactions on Computer Systems, 9 (1):21-65, February 1991. tocs91.pdf    Martin Rozee

 

Donnybrook: Enabling Large-Scale, High-Speed, Peer-to-peer Games. Ashwin Bharambe, John R. Douceur, Jacob R. Lorch, Thomas Moscibroda, Jeffrey Pang, Srinivasan Seshan, and Xinyu Zhuang, SIGCOMM, 2008. donnybrook.pdf  Ahmed Farroukh

Fundamentals of Grid Computing, IBM    http://www.redbooks.ibm.com/redpapers/pdfs/redp3613.pdf  Kam Pui Tang

Paper summaries

 

Oct 12

Thanksgiving Holiday

 No class

 

 

Oct 19

Software Distributed Shared Memory

Informal oral project proposals.

 

Kai Li, Paul Hudak Memory Coherence in Shared Virtual Memory Systems, 1991 ivy91.pdf 

John Carter, John Bennett, and Willy Zwaenepoel Implementation and Performance of Munin munin91.pdf   Maxim Siniavine

A performance study of general-purpose applications on graphics processors using CUDA, Shuai Che, Michael Boyer, Jiayuan Meng, David Tarjan, Jeremy W. Sheaffer, Kevin Skadron, JPDC, Volume 68, Issue 10,  General-Purpose Processing sing Graphics Processing Units, October 2008. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.jpdc.2008.05.014 Amirhassan Asgari

Paper summaries

 

Oct 26

Software Distributed Shared Memory

Informal oral project proposals (contd).

TreadMarks: Distributed Shared Memory on Standard Workstations and Operating Systems, P. Keleher, A.L. Cox, S. Dwarkadas and W. Zwaenepoel, OSDI '94.  treadmarks94.pdf  Zoe Chow

OpenMP for Networks of SMPs, Y.C. Hu, H. Lu, A.L. Cox, and W. Zwaenepoel, Journal of Parallel and Distributed Computing, vol. 60 (12), pp. 1512-1530, December 2000  
openmpsmp.pdf   Colin Lee

Short Introduction to Event-Driven Servers by Instructor

Paper summaries

 

Nov 2

Multithreading vs Event-Driven model for Server Code

Flash: An Efficient and Portable Web Server, Vivek S. Pai, Peter Druschel, Willy Zwaenepoel, USENIX Annual Technical Conference, 1999. flash.pdf    Ivan So

SEDA: An Architecture for Well-Conditioned, Scalable Internet Services. Presented at the Eighteenth Symposium on Operating Systems Principles (SOSP'01), Lake Louise, Canada, October 24, 2001. seda-sosp01.pdf     Syed Hassan

Lazy Asynchronous I/O for Event Driven Servers. Khaled Elmeleegy, Anupam Chanda, Alan L. Cox and Willy Zwaenepoel, in Proceedings of the USENIX 2004 Annual Technical Conference. laio04.pdf   Vince Mirian 

Papers summaries

 

Nov 9 

Advanced Synchronization Mechanisms in Multiprocessor and Distributed Systems

 

Adaptive Overload Control for Busy Internet Servers, Matt Welsh and David Culler. In Proceedings of the 4th USENIX Conference on Internet Technologies and Systems (USITS'03), March 2003.  seda-usits03.pdf   Angela Lam      

Free Transactions with Rio Vista
David E. Lowell and Peter M. Chen vista.pdf  Naweed Tajuddin

Data Replication Strategies for Fault Tolerance and Availability on Commodity Clusters  C. Amza, A. Cox, W. Zwaenepoel.
Proceedings of the International Conference on Dependable Systems and Networks 
(DSN), June 2000 vistareplication.pdf  Zhengjun Feng

Paper summaries

 

Nov 16

Optimizing for Underlying Parallel/Distributed Architecture

Code Transformations to Improve Memory Parallelism Vijay S. Pai and Sarita Adve pai_micro99.pdf    Young Yoon

Distributed Versioning: Consistent Replication for Scaling Back-end Databases of Dynamic Content Web Sites
C. Amza, A. Cox, W. Zwaenepoel.
Proceedings of the ACM/IFIP/Usenix Middleware Conference, June 2003 dversioning.pdf  Patricia Hon    

Cache-Conscious Concurrency Control of Main-Memory Indexes on Shared-Memory Multiprocessor Systems
Sang K. Cha, Sangyong Hwang, Kihong Kim, Keunjoo Kwon
cache-conscious-concurrency-control.pdf  Jungmoo Oh 

Paper summaries

 

Nov 23

Concurrent and Distributed Transaction Processing Systems

A Case for Staged Database Systems. Stavros Harizopoulos and Anastassia Ailamaki  stages.pdf  Chen Chen

STEPS Towards Cache-Resident Transaction Processing, Stavros Harizopoulos and Anastassia Ailamaki. Proceedings of the 30th International Conference on Very Large Data Bases, Toronto, Canada, August 2004.
steps.pdf   Mehmet Avci

Exploring Thread-Level Speculation in Software: The Effects of Memory
Access Tracking Granularity
Spiros Papadimitriou, Todd Mowry, 2001 swdsm_tls.pdf   Jeff Wong  

Paper summaries

Informal written (one page) project progress report



Nov 30

Putting it All Together:

Nonblocking Synchronization, Transactional Memory

 

Read Copy Update: Using Execution History to Solve Concurrency Problems. Mc Kenney P. and Slingwine J. rcu.pdf   Diego Huang

Maurice Herlihy, Victor Luchangco, Mark Moir, William N. Scherer III: Software transactional memory for dynamic-sized data structures. PODC 2003 podc-moir.pdf  Meric Aydonat  

Bratin Saha, Ali-Reza Adl-Tabatabai, Richard L. Hudson, Chi Cao Minh, Benjamin Hertzberg. McRT-STM: A High Performance Software Transactional Memory System for a Multi-Core Runtime. PPoPP 2006 mcrt.pdf  Taneem Ahmed

Paper summaries

 

 TBA

Transactional Memory

 

Kaloian Manassiev, Madalin Mihailescu and Cristiana Amza.Exploiting Distributed Version Consistency in a Transactional Memory Cluster. PPoPP 2006 dtm.pdf  

Sanjeev Kumar, Michael Chu, Christopher J. Hughes, Partha Kundu, Anthony Nguyen. Hybrid Transactional Memory. PPoPP 2006 hybridtm.pdf   

Paper summaries

 

TBA

 

Project class presentation

 

 

 

 

Dec 22

Final project report due