Monash University Handbook 2011 Postgraduate - Unit

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

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. This unit examines both shared memory and message passing paradigms in both hardware and software; concurrency, multithreading and synchronicity; parallel, clustered and distributed supercomputing models and languages. Students will program in these paradigms.

Objectives

At the completion of this unit students will have:

• knowledge of a variety of parallel architectures, such as bus-based, massively parallel, cluster, vector;
• knowledge of a variety of parallel programming paradigms, synchronisation and parallelisation primitives, message passing, data parallel, tuple space;
• understanding of concurrency, synchronicity and parallelism;
• understanding of the design issues of parallel systems;
• skills in designing, developing and debugging parallel programs using a variety of paradigms.

Assessment

Assignments: 100%

Chief examiner(s)

Dr Asad Khan

Contact hours

2 hrs lectures/wk

Prerequisites

Recommended knowledge: operating systems, including synchronisation and interprocess communication mechanisms; advanced computer architecture, including pipelining techniques.

Prohibitions

CSE4333

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

http://www.infotech.monash.edu.au/units/fit5174/