Nodari Sitchinava
Assistant Professor
Parallel processors are everywhere: servers, desktops, tablets, even cell phones. However, writing programs that take advantage of all the available parallelism is challenging, in part because it requires different techniques than what we have learned in the sequential algorithms courses.
This course will teach how to design and analyze algorithms for parallel systems. The students will learn the techniques for designing and analyzing parallel algorithms for various parallel models of computation (shared memory, distributed memory, interconnection networks) and how these models relate to modern parallel systems, such as multicores, clusters and GPUs.
This is a course on advanced algorithmic concepts, so you should be very comfortable with asymptotic notation, design and analysis of basic algorithms, and the algorithms taught in an undergraduate algorithms course (most of the material from the CLRS textbook) . If you have taken an algorithms course outside of the UH system, email me with a brief description of the algorithms course(s) that you have taken (a link to the course webpage is a plus) and I'll provide you with an override to register for the course.
The following manuscript is also a good introduction to parallel algorithms:
Students in this course are subject to all the policies of ICS Department and the University of Hawaii at Manoa, including but not limited to the following:
Cheating. Any form of cheating (such as plagiarism and unauthorized collaboration on an assignment) results in the grade of F and will be reported to ICS Department for further actions. Students are encouraged to work on homework solutions in groups. However, the final write up must be performed individually, in own words (including pseudocode), that means copying solution from each other is NOT permitted. It is easy to detect if a student changed some variable names or reordered lines of code. For every problem that you discussed with someone, you must list the names of people you have discussed it with.
Abuse of Facilities. Any form of abuse of computing resources of ICS Department or the University of Hawaii will not be tolerated. It results in termination of your account on their servers any time the abuse is detected, will lead to the grade F, and will be reported to ICS Department for further actions. Inappropriate content that may be of an offensive nature to other students should not be displayed on laptops or group workstations during class.
Makeup. If a student missed an exam due to illness or injury, a makeup exam will be given to a student only when the student has a doctor's note dated that day and contacts the instructor by email within 3 days after the exam date or the date that the doctor's note suggests the student to recover enough to contact the instructor. However, an ordinary doctor's appointment (scheduled by a student in advance) is not an acceptable reason for makeup unless it is inevitable to conflict with an exam beyond control of the student. The makeup exam must be completed before exam solutions are reviewed in class.
For an exceptional case other than illness or injury, a student must submit an official document to the instructor providing sufficiently convincing evidence of the fact that the cause for missing an exam was beyond control of the student (e.g., in case of a traffic accident on a way to a class, a police record of the accident should be furnished).