ECE574: Cluster Computing

University of Maine ECE

Spring 2025

Instructor: Vincent Weaver
The class meeting time is Tues/Thurs at 12:30pm-1:45pm.
The meeting place is Barrows 130.
Final exam: there is no final exam for this course.

Office hours:

Weaver: 2pm-3pm Tues/Thurs. Also you can stop by if I'm in my office.

Syllabus

ece574_2025s.pdf

Official Course Description

Advances in high-end computational technology continue to bring the digital revolution into academic, industrial and commercial areas. A popular approach for achieving high performance for these application domains is to use parallel computers. Introduces the primary parallel computer architectures, as well as the programming techniques applicable to concurrent, parallel and distributed computations. Students will gain experience in developing parallel computing solutions for challenging problems. Lec 3. (Offered once every two years - Spring.)

Class Schedule

	Tuesday	Thursday
Week 1	21 January Intro to Cluster Computing Lecture 1 Notes	23 January Top500 List Lecture 2 Notes
Week 2	28 January Speedup/Scaling/Performance Measurement Lecture 3 Notes	30 January Clusters / Job Scheduling / SLURM Lecture 4 Notes
Week 3	4 February Computer Architecture Review / CPU Parallelism	6 February Convolution,SMT/SMP/NUMA
Week 4	11 February Multi-Threading	13 February Pthreads/Locking
Week 5	18 February OpenMP	20 February OpenMP Examples
Week 6	25 February Distributed Systems / MPI	27 February More MPI / Examples
Week 7	4 March MPI Examples, HW#6 Guide	6 March First Midterm
Week 8	11 March Reliability	13 March Fault Tolerance / Checkpointing
Week 9	18 March Spring Break	20 March Spring Break
Week 10	25 March Accelerators / GPUs	27 March GPGPUs
Week 11	1 April CUDA	3 April Power/Energy in Clusters
Week 12	8 April Other Accels, OpenCL	10 April OpenCL
Week 13	15 April Virtualization, Cloud, Python	17 April Big Data, Cluster Filesystems Data Analysis, Hadoop, Spark
Week 14	22 April Second Exam	24 April The future of HPC, Next Stop: Zettascale
Week 15	29 April Project Presentations	1 May Project Presentations

Homework Assignments

Homework 1 -- Top500 List
- ece574_hw01.pdf
- Assigned: 21 January 2025
- Due: 23 January 2025 (submit via e-mail but also bring notes to class)
Homework 2 -- Running HPL
- ece574_hw02.pdf
- Assigned: 30 January 2025
- Due: 6 February 2025 (submit via e-mail)

Project

Relevant Papers

D.J. Becker, T. Sterling, D. Savarese, J.E. Dorband, U.A. Ranawak, and C.V. Packer. "BEOWULF: A parallel workstation for scientific computation." ICPP-95. (pdf)
G. Bell and J. Gray. "High Performance Computing: Crays, Clusters and Centers. What's Next?" 2001. (pdf)
Dongarra, Sterling, Simon, and Strohmaier. "High Performance Computing: Clusters, Constellations, MPPs, and Future Directions". 2003. (pdf)

Optional Reading

Good Pthread tutorial
Useful Textbooks
- Memory Systems: Cache, DRAM, Disk. Jacob, Ng and Wang.
- Computer Architecture: A Quantitative Approach. Hennessy and Patterson.
- UNIX Systems for Modern Architectures. Schimmel.
Cache/BranchPrediction Info
- Agner Fog's x86 Optimization Guides
- Ulrich Drepper's "What Every Programmer Should Know About Memory
perf_event info
- perf_event_open() manpage
Low Level Operating System Details (lecture 1 and lecture 2)
- Computer Science from the Bottom Up
Assembly Language Manuals

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Last updated 23 January 2025, 16:53