Last modified Wednesday, 06-May-2009 10:40:37 CDT

Announcements
Contact Information
Course Description
Lecture Notes
Beta Book Chapters
Homework
Exams
Tools
Useful Links

Announcements:

• 05/06/09: Midterm 2 (take home) posted: [DOC][PDF]. Due Tue 5/12/09 at 12:00noon.
• 05/01/09: Presentation schedule posted.
• 03/27/09: Remaining lecture schedule posted.
• 03/27/09: Second-half reading & review schedule posted.
• 03/23/09: Project information posted.
• 03/10/09: HW#2 solution is posted.
• 03/09/09: Midterm 1 review slides posted.
• 03/03/09: Midterm Review Questions are available for download.
• 02/27/09: Reading schedule revised; case studies postponed to midterm 2.
• 02/27/09: HW#2 due date shifted to 3/9/09 (Monday)
• 02/25/09: HW#2 is posted, due 3/6/09.
• 02/25/09: Interesting ECE600 seminar at 3:45pm on Monday, 3/1 in EH1227.
• 01/30/09: HW#1 posted, due Wed. 2/18/09 in class.
• 01/23/09: First-half reading & review schedule posted.
• 01/20/09: Syllabus posted.
• 01/20/09: HW#0 posted, due 1/23/09 in class.
• 01/19/09: Birth of the ECE/CS 757 home page.

Contact List:

Course mailing lists (only registered students can send messages):

• ece757-1-s09@lists.wisc.edu

Instructor:

Prof. Mikko Lipasti
Office: 4613 Engineering Hall
Office Hours: M 1-4, R9-11
Email: mikko at engr.wisc.edu

TAs:

• Mitch Hayenga, Office: EH - 3652, Office Hours: MW 2:15 - 3:30 and most afternoons by email appointment, Email: hayenga at wisc.edu
• Andy Nere, Office: EH - 3652, Office Hours: MW 12:15 - 1:30 and most afternoons by email appointment, Email: andrew.nere at gmail.com

Course Description

This course covers parallelism and the design of parallel computers. Historically, parallel computers have been designed for the sole purpose of quickly solving large-scale computational problems like weather forecasting or molecular modeling (to name just two examples). These problems are usually expressed as a series of floating-point computations of large data sets stored in multidimensional arrays, and can usually be partitioned across multiple processors to achieve large-scale parallelism. However, within the last fifteen years, new applications for parallel computers have eclipsed these traditional numeric codes, and are the driving force behind the tremendous volume and revenue growth in the marketplace for parallel computers. These applications span all the way from commercial server workloads that run in managed datacenters, to heavily-threaded games and web browsers running on PCs and laptops, to massively data-parallel applications like graphics rendering. In other words, parallelism in applications and in hardware has become pervasive in our industry.

This course will study the nature of parallelism across these application domains, as well as the hardware required to support parallel execution. We will investigate techniques for detecting, increasing, and exploiting parallelism across this spectrum of workloads, and will study in detail the design of various components of parallel computer systems. The discussion will rely heavily on examples of real or proposed parallel designs.

Prerequisites: ECE 552 (or equivalent) and CS 537 (not strictly enforced). NOTE: ECE 752 is not a prerequisite for this course.

There is no course textbook. Instead, we will rely on beta book chapters by Prof. Jim Smith, and readings from the literature:

• First-half reading and review schedule.
• Second-half TBD

Lecture Notes

Updated as semester progresses

• Lecture 01: Welcome and Introduction [ PDF][ PPT ]
• Lecture 02: Multiprocessor Software and ISA [PDF from JES] For reference:
  • [PPT for OpenMP]
  • [PPT for pthreads]
  • [PPT for MPI] (skim only; detailed coverage deferred to April)
• Lecture 03: 752 Review [PDF][PPT]
• Lecture 04: Cores, multithreading [PDF from JES][PPT from JES] (slide 44 to the end)
• Lecture 05: Multicore [PDF][PPT]
• Lecture 06: Coherence [PDF][PPT] For reference:
  • [PDF] for JES lecture corresponding to Ch. 4 reading.
• Lecture 07: Consistency [PDF][PPT]
• Lecture 08: Transactional Memory (for reference only) [PDF][PPT]
• Lecture 09a: Interconnects - Introduction [PDF][PPT07]
• Lecture 09b: Interconnects - Topology & Routing [PDF][PPT]
• Lecture 09c: Interconnects - Microarchitecture [PDF][PPT07]
• Lecture 09d: Dependencies & Deadlocks (guest lecture by Greg Thorson) [PDF][PPT]
• Lecture 10: Clusters [PDF][PPT]
• Lecture 11: Massively-Parallel Processors (MPP) [PDF][PPT]
• Lecture 12: SIMD [PDF][PPT]
• Lecture 13: CUDA and GPGPU [PDF][PPT]
• Lecture 14: Dataflow [PDF][PPT]

Beta Book Chapters, (c) Jim Smith

NOTE: request access password via email from instructor

• Chapter 1: [PDF]
• Chapter 2: [PDF]
• Chapter 3: [PDF]
• Chapter 4: [PDF]

Homework:

• Homework #0 posted, due Friday, 1/23, in class
• Homework #1 posted, due Wed, 2/18, in class
• Homework #2 posted, due Mon, 3/9, in class

To check your recorded homework grades, log in to Learn@UW using your NetID and password (same as your as @wisc.edu email username or your my.wisc.edu login), click on "2009 - SPRING" and then ECE/CS 757.

Exams:

• Exam 1, Wednesday 3/11 in class.
  • Sample exam, though scope and length (it's a take-home) are different
  • List of questions from readings
  • Review slides [PPT] [PDF]
• Exam 2, non-comprehensive take home exam.
  • Distributed 5/6/09: [DOC][PDF]
  • Due Tuesday 5/12/09 at 12:00noon.
  • Please deliver in person to Prof. Lipasti's office (EH4613).

Tools:

TBD

Useful Links:

• UW Writing Center
• Computer Architecture Research at Wisconsin
• Computer Architecture Seminar (Tuesdays 4:00-5:00 PM)
• Computer Architecture Mailing List
• ACM Digital Library
• World-Wide Computer Architecture Information

Note: if you have trouble accessing this page, contact Mikko Lipasti (mikko@engr.wisc.edu)