Monash University Handbook 2011 Undergraduate - Unit

Refer to the specific census and withdrawal dates for the semester(s) in which this unit is offered.

Level	Undergraduate
Faculty	Faculty of Information Technology
Offered	Clayton First semester 2011 (Day)

Synopsis

Modern computer systems contain parallelism in both hardware and software. This unit covers parallelism in both general purpose and application specific computer architectures and the programming paradigms that allow parallelism to be exploited in software. The unit examines both shared memory and message passing paradigms in both hardware and software; concurrency, multithreading and synchronicity; parallel, clustered and distributed supercomputing models, languages and software tools and development environments. Students will program in these paradigms.

Objectives

At the completion of this unit students will have -

A knowledge and understanding of:

• a variety of parallel architectures, such as bus-based, massively parallel, cluster, vector, GPU;
• a variety of parallel programming paradigms, synchronisation and parallelisation primitives, message passing, data parallel, tuple space;

concurrency, synchronicity and parallelism;

• software development environments and tools (including performance tools);
• the design issues of parallel systems.

An appreciation of:

• the needs of parallel applications.

Developed skills in:

• designing, developing and debugging parallel programs using a variety of paradigms;
• measuring the performance of parallel applications and tuning implementation.

Assessment

Examination: 50%; In-semester assessment: 50%

Chief examiner(s)

Dr Asad Khan

Contact hours

2 hrs lectures/wk, 2 hr laboratory/wk, 1 hr tutorial/wk

Prerequisites

FIT2004

Prohibitions

FIT4001, CSE4333

Additional information on this unit is available from the faculty at:

http://www.infotech.monash.edu.au/units/fit3143.html