Parallel Processors Beyond Multicore Processing

3 credits · Graduate

Formerly EE392Q. The current parallel computing research emphasizes multi-cores, but there are alterna-tive array processors with significant potential. This hands-on course focuses on SIMD (Single-Instruction, Multiple-Data) massively parallel processors. Topics: Flynn's Taxonomy, parallel architectures, Kestrel architecture and simulator, principles of SIMD programming, parallel sorting with sorting networks, string comparison with dynamic programming (edit distance, Smith-Waterman), arbitrary-precision operations with fixed-point numbers, reductions, vector and matrix multiplication, image processing algo-rithms, asynchronous algorithms on SIMD ("SIMD Phase Programming Model"), Man-delbrot set, analysis of parallel performance.