Undergraduate - UnitFIT3143 - Parallel computing

This unit entry is for students who completed this unit in 2012 only. For students planning to study the unit, please refer to the unit indexes in the the current edition of the Handbook. If you have any queries contact the managing faculty for your course or area of study.

print version

6 points, SCA Band 2, 0.125 EFTSL

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

Level	Undergraduate
Faculty	Faculty of Information Technology
Offered	Clayton First semester 2012 (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.

Outcomes

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.