Pervasive Parallel And Distributed Computing In A Liberal Arts College Curriculum

We present a model for incorporating parallel and distributed computing (PDC) throughout an undergraduate CS curriculum. Our curriculum is designed to introduce students early to parallel and distributed computing topics and to expose students to these topics repeatedly in the context of a wide variety of CS courses. The key to our approach is the development of a required intermediate-level course that serves as a introduction to computer systems and parallel computing. It serves as a requirement for every CS major and minor and is a prerequisite to upper-level courses that expand on parallel and distributed computing topics in different contexts. With the addition of this new course, we are able to easily make room in upper-level courses to add and expand parallel and distributed computing topics. The goal of our curricular design is to ensure that every graduating CS major has exposure to parallel and distributed computing, with both a breadth and depth of coverage. Our curriculum is particularly designed for the constraints of a small liberal arts college, however, much of its ideas and its design are applicable to any undergraduate CS curriculum

Dynamic Loop Scheduling Using MPI Passive-Target Remote Memory Access

Scientific applications often contain large computationally-intensive parallel loops. Loop scheduling techniques aim to achieve load balanced executions of such applications. For distributed-memory systems, existing dynamic loop scheduling (DLS) libraries are typically MPI-based, and employ a master-worker execution model to assign variably-sized chunks of loop iterations. The master-worker execution model may adversely impact performance due to the master-level contention. This work proposes a distributed chunk-calculation approach that does not require the master-worker execution scheme. Moreover, it considers the novel features in the latest MPI standards, such as passive-target remote memory access, shared-memory window creation, and atomic read-modify-write operations. To evaluate the proposed approach, five well-known DLS techniques, two applications, and two heterogeneous hardware setups have been considered. The DLS techniques implemented using the proposed approach outperformed their counterparts implemented using the traditional master-worker execution model

EOS: A project to investigate the design and construction of real-time distributed embedded operating systems

The EOS project is investigating the design and construction of a family of real-time distributed embedded operating systems for reliable, distributed aerospace applications. Using the real-time programming techniques developed in co-operation with NASA in earlier research, the project staff is building a kernel for a multiple processor networked system. The first six months of the grant included a study of scheduling in an object-oriented system, the design philosophy of the kernel, and the architectural overview of the operating system. In this report, the operating system and kernel concepts are described. An environment for the experiments has been built and several of the key concepts of the system have been prototyped. The kernel and operating system is intended to support future experimental studies in multiprocessing, load-balancing, routing, software fault-tolerance, distributed data base design, and real-time processing