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:

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

TuesdayThursday
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
Lecture 5 Notes
6 February
No Class (snowstorm)
Week 4 11 February
Convolution,SMT/SMP/NUMA
Lecture 6 Notes
13 February
No Class, (another snowstorm)
Week 5 18 February
Multi-Threading
Lecture 7 Notes
20 February
Pthreads
Lecture 8 Notes
Lecture 8 Code Samples
Week 6 25 February
OpenMP
Lecture 9 Notes
27 February
OpenMP Examples
Lecture 10 Notes
Lecture 10 Code Samples
Week 7 4 March
MPI
Lecture 11 Notes
6 March
First Midterm
Week 8 11 March
MPI Examples
Lecture 12 Notes
Lecture 12 Code Samples
13 March
HW#6 Hints, HPC Reliability
Lecture 13 Notes
Week 9 18 March
Spring Break
20 March
Spring Break
Week 10 25 March
Fault Tolerance / Checkpointing
Lecture 14 Notes
27 March
Accelerators / GPU Background
Lecture 15 Notes
Week 11 1 April
GPGPU/NVIDIA Background
Lecture 16 Notes
3 April
CUDA Programming
Lecture 17 Notes
Lecture 17 Code Samples
Week 12 8 April
Other Accels, OpenCL
Lecture 18 Notes
Lecture 18 Code Samples
10 April
Virtualization, Cloud, Containers
Lecture 19 Notes
Week 13 15 April
Python, Big Data
Lecture 20 Notes
17 April
Cluster Filesystems, Hadoop, Spark
Lecture 21 Notes
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


Project


Relevant Papers


Optional Reading


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Last updated 15 April 2025, 16:53