CSC352 Class Page 2010

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Projects

• Project 1: Will start first, after we have seen some more python threads
• Project 2: Will deal with the Xgrid
• Project 3: Will deal with Hadoop
• Project 4 has officially started on 1/26/10! Find its shared wiki page here!

Python Threads

Week	Topics	Reading
Week 1 1/25	Tuesday Introduce Syllabus Interrupts Thursday The PogoPlug... The iPad... Python Review NQueens.py: a python program to find the first solution for N queens on an NxN board. Lecture Notes	Read What is a Thread? [1] What is a Processes? [2] Reference material for when we start programming Python.org's page on Thread Objects. It's the reference, but is not always crystal clear... Linux Gazette Article on Python Threads. Good overall introduction. Norm Matloff's introduction to Python Threads. More details, less easy to follow. For Discussion next Tuesday read the paper by Asanovic K. et al, The Landscape of Parallel Computing Research: A View from Berkeley.
Week 2 2/1	Tuesday discussion (prepare a 1-page summary) of the paper by Asanovic K. et al, The Landscape of Parallel Computing Research: A View from Berkeley, Dec. 2006. (cached copy) Thursday Python classExample1.py classExample2.py classExample3.py serialPing.py Python Threads threadedPing.py : a threaded solution to the serial ping program ThreadedNQueens.py : a threaded solution to the N-Queens program Homework #1 Lecture Notes	Make sure to read Norman Matloff's tutorial on threads in the section on Python on the Resource Page. Also, don't hesitate to check Python.org for information on threads.
Week 3 2/8	Tuesday An experiment with Control-C... Sharing in shared memory the problem atomicity of operations semaphores fair safe live Python locks examples: threadedPingWithLocks.py threadedPingWithSemaphores.py Thursday Discussion: "Why Von Neumann?" Continuation of Shared Memory and Sharing Python Queues threadedPingWithQueues.py Some notes on Python and treads An alternative to Threading: Multiprocessing Available with Python 2.6 and up only multiprocessingNQueens.py Comparison of the two methods Performance measures Speedup Execution time Processor utilization Processor efficiency Processor efficacy Guidlines for presenting research papers Deadlocks Homework #2 Lecture Notes	Measuring Performance Video from Sun Microsystems on parallelizing applications and improving their performance (19 minutes) Deadlocks PEP 371 (cached copy)
Week 4 2/15	Tuesday Discusion of Xen and the Art of Virtualization One person presents Everybody else submits a 1-page summary in 3 parts. Review of HW #1 A visit of the XGrid system (Photos) Thursday Amdahl's Law Deadlocks: the main rule How to Read Technical Papers Summarize this! Good background information: MPI Introduction to the next projects A Video presentation of the XGrid Lecture Notes	Additional information on Xen can be found in Mauer, R., Xen Virtualization and Linux Clustering, Linux Journal January 12th, 2006. A video on the Python GIL discovered by Diana.

XGrid Programming

Week	Topics	Reading
Week x	Tuesday Thursday Lecture Notes	Apple's XGrid Introduction Tutorial #1: Monte Carlo
Week x	Tuesday Thursday Lecture Notes
Week x	Tuesday Thursday Lecture Notes
Week x	Tuesday Thursday Lecture Notes

Cloud Computing

Week	Topics	Reading
Week x	Tuesday Thursday Lecture Notes
Week x	Tuesday Thursday Lecture Notes
Week x	Tuesday Thursday Lecture Notes
Week x	Tuesday Thursday Lecture Notes
Week x	Tuesday Thursday Lecture Notes