COSC 6422: Parallel and Distributed Computing

Assignment 1

A number of pointers to various pieces of documentation will be provide for you use for this course. There is no need to print the vast majority of this stuff. If you print things unneccessarily these helpful pointers will disappear.

Assignment 1

Assignment 1 requires the use of two parallel programming packages, PVM and Treadmarks. The following html guide for PVM, and user doc for Treadmarks, will be both useful and necessary for completing this assignment.

• PVM User's Guide and Tutorial
  • Start by reading the Section on "Using PVM" (skipping "How to obtain PVM").
  • You must create a pvm3 directory in your home directory. In the pvm3 directory you must add a bin directory and under the bin directory you must have a directory for each architecture that you wish to run your program on. SGI5 for the SGI machines and SUN4SOL2 for the SUN machines. (See ~brecht/pvm3 on the LCSR machines for examples).
  • Have a look at ~brecht/.cshrc as well as the modified Makefiles in ~brecht/pvm3/examples. Try to get the hello and hello_other examples working. Configure a machine with multiple processors and run hello a number of times.
• PVM Introduction Paper
  • Note that this is a very dated paper but it will give you an overview. Use the example programs and the "PVM User's Guide and Tutorial" to help you to write programs.
• TreadMarks
• Message Passing versus Distributed Shared Memory on Networks of Workstations
  • Postscript
  • HTML

Student               Application

Your Name             The name of the application your are writing.
Lila                  LU decomposition
Yang                  Quicksort
Laura                 Cholesky Decomposition
Chang Li              Successive Over Relaxation
Xin Wang              Merge Sort
Xiaoyan               Jacobi
Matthew               Travelling Salesperson problem
Razvan                Neural networks - Back propagation algorithm
Behrad                FFT