Domain Specific Parallel Programming

Course Code:
Short description: The course is intended to give general insights into current research and development efforts being undertaken to meet the future needs of energy-efficient embedded systems and high-performance computing. In particular the course aims at providing hands-on experience of applying parallelism of various types that exists in all modern computer architectures by using domain-specific programming techniques.
Course Level: Advanced
Course page: {{{CourseUrl}}}

Contact

Lecturer

Zain Ul-Abdin, Tomas Nordström

• Office: E 307
• Telephone 035 16 7309
• Email: [1]

Learning Objectives

• Knowledge and understanding
  • describe and explain the most important parallel architecture models, as well as parallel programming models, and discuss their respective pros, cons, and application opportunities
• Skills and abilities
  • program parallel computer systems intended for embedded applications
  • describe, evaluate, and discuss how the choice of programming model and method influences, e.g., execution time and required resources
  • read and understand scientific articles in the area, to review and discuss them and to make summaries and presentations
• Judgement and approach
  • discuss and relate the merits of various architectures supporting data-level parallelism
  • discuss and relate the high-level domain-specific programming techniques with respect to low-level hand-written program development

Primary Contents

The course is divided into a lecture part, a programming exercises part including a small project, and a seminar series based on selected course literature. The lecture part includes tutorials about the state-of-the-art manycore architectures, CAL language, and the Epiphany manycore architecture (Parallella Platform) that are then used in the practical part of the course. The laboratory part provides hands-on experience of embedded parallel computing using CAL dataflow language and compiling the programs onto an emerging low-power manycore processor as well as using its proprietary low-level programming tools. In the seminar part of the course, course participants make detailed studies of the literature related to models of computation and parallel programming methodologies for high-performance embedded computing and present their findings in the form of seminar. The university’s research projects are included in these special studies.