CSC352 Syllabus 2013

--D. Thiebaut (talk) 10:55, 9 August 2013 (EDT)

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Main Page | Syllabus | Schedule | Links & Resources

Instructor

Prof. Dominique Thiébaut (dthiebaut at smith.edu)
Dept. Computer Science
Ford Hall 356
Telephone: 3854
Office hours TBA and by appointments

Introduction

Parallel and Distributed Processing (formally Parallel Processing) is a seminar mixing theory, programming and research. It explores the issues facing today's programmers in need of process data existing in either a large volume, or distributed over a network (local or the Internet).

The course this semester focuses on a research problem and attempting to formulate a solution or an approach for it. The problem is to take a large collection of images (possibly several million images) and to create a visualization of these images in a way that will enhance some pattern or properties attached to the images. This property could be some quantity linked to the popularity of images as viewed by visitors, or the frequency with which they are used, or the date when they were introduced in the collection, the date of last time an image was viewed, etc...

The goal of the seminar is to understand how to devise solutions for the various tasks required to process, catalog, sort, and display such a large amount of data. In the process we will investigate various parallel computing tools, and test different approaches to solve this problem in an acceptable time (minutes or hours rather than days or years of computation!).

The class mixes lectures, the reading and presentation of research papers, and programming assignments/projects.

The topics planned for the semester include (but are not limited to):

• An exploration of how artists have displayed collection of images in the art world, with one or more visits to the SCMA.
• Using Latex to write scientific research papers.
• Investigating the various types of parallel computers and parallel architectures.
• Learning about the different programming patterns for parallel programs.
• Exploring data-sharing programming with Java threads, and how to avoid data inconsistency and deadlocks with mutexes, locks and semaphores.
• Exploring the message-passing paradigm with MPI. There will be a quick introduction to C before using it with MPI.
• Exploring the world of cloud computing with the Map-Reduce approach to process large amounts of data on large clusters of servers. The infrastructure used will be Hadoop, and the programming in Java.

A group project will cap the end of the semester. The goal of the project will be to address one of the many tasks discovered during the semester for visualizing the collection of images, generating a parallel approach for it, and comparing its performance to the current state of the art, and reporting the results in a research paper.

Newsletter

Everybody will be responsible for generating a 2-page newsletter every other week.

Homework assignments/Projects

There will be homework assignments and a project. The homework assignments will contribute to the advancement of the overall project.

Piazza

On an experimental basis, we will use Piazza four on-line discussion of issues related to the class material. The system is catered to getting you help fast and efficiently from classmates, and your instructor. When a question is about an assignment, a software bug, or something the whole class could benefit knowing about, you are encouraged to post your questions on Piazza.

Find our class page at: https://piazza.com/smith/fall2013/csc352/home, and its user guide here.

Smith Cloud

We will use different computer clusters available on campus. More information will be released as the course progresses.

Presentations

We'll read, present and discuss papers during the semester. Papers will be posted on the Links & Resources page. More information will be available as we proceed through the semester.

Whenever a paper is scheduled for presentation or discussion, everybody not presenting the paper will be responsible for handing out at the beginning of the class a one-page summary of the paper, formatted in Latex.

Prerequisites

Algorithms CSC252, or permission of the instructor. A good knowledge of Java is important.

Schedule

The class meets twice a week, on Tuesdays and Thursdays, 1:00-2:50 p.m., in Ford Hall 345.

Textbook

There are no textbooks for this course. The Web has a rich collection of documents we'll be using and which are catalogued in the Links & Resources page.

Other Sources of Material

The science library has a good collection of books on parallel processing and algorithms that you might find useful for supplementing the material presented and covered in class. "Parallel algorithm", "Parallel Programming," or "Grid Computing" are good keywords to start a search on.

Lateness Policy

No late assignment/paper summariy/project will be accepted (except in case of documented illness or personal difficulties). Do your work on time!

You can, however, drop any one homework assignment and any one reading assignment without penalty. If you do not drop any assignment and do not drop any assigned reading, I will remove the ones with the lowest grade automatically.

Grading

Class participation (summaries, class notes, discussion)        Homework Project Paper presentations

10% 15% 60% 15%

Teaching Assistants

No TA for this class.

Software Used in the Class

• Java and Eclipse. All serious programmers should know how to use Eclipse, and should have it installed on their computer.

Below is a non-exhaustive list of software packages we'll use in the class. You may want to investigate installing them on your computer.

• Latex for writing scientific papers. TexStudio is a good visual editor, but there is also a nice on-line editor at sharelatex.com that does not require any installation and works well.
• MatPlotLib for processing data and generating graphs.
• MPI, the Message-Passing Interface platform for parallel programs. It is installed on beowulf and beowulf2, but you may like to also have it on your computer, although it is not necessary.