ECE574: Cluster Computing

University of Maine ECE

Fall 2026

Instructor: Vincent Weaver
The class meeting time is Mon/Wed/Fri at 11:00am-11:50am.
The meeting place is Barrows 133.
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_2026f.pdf (not posted yet)

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	31 August Intro to Cluster Computing	2 September Intro to Cluster Computing	4 September Top500 List
Week 2	7 September No Class, Labor Day	9 September Speedup/Scaling/Performance Measurement	11 September Clusters / Job Scheduling / SLURM
Week 3	14 September NSF Workshop	16 September Computer Architecture Review	18 September CPU Parallelism
Week 4	21 September Convolution	23 September SMT/SMP/NUMA	25 September SMT/SMP/NUMA
Week 5	28 September Multi-Threading	30 September Multi-Threading	2 October Pthreads
Week 6	5 October OpenMP	7 October OpenMP	9 October OpenMP Examples
Week 7	12 October Fall Break	14 October MPI	16 October First Midterm
Week 8	19 October MPI Examples	21 October No Class -- Engineering Job Fair	23 March HW#6 Hints, HPC Reliability
Week 9	26 October Fault Tolerance / Checkpointing	28 October Fault Tolerance / Checkpointing	30 October Accelerators / GPU Background
Week 10	2 November GPGPU/NVIDIA Background	4 November GPGPU/NVIDIA Background	6 November CUDA Programming
Week 11	9 November Other Accels, OpenCL	11 November Veteran's Day	13 November Virtualization, Cloud, Containers
Week 12	16 November Python, Big Data	18 November Python, Big Data	20 November Cluster Filesystems, Hadoop, Spark
Week 13	23 November ????	25 November Thanksgiving	27 November Thanksgiving
Week 14	30 November The future of HPC, Next Stop: Zettascale	2 December Exam Review	4 December Second Exam
Week 15	7 December Project Presentations	9 December Project Presentations	11 December Project Presentations

Homework Assignments

Homework 1 -- Top500 List
- Assigned:
- Due:

Project

Topic Selection due:
Status Update Due:
Presentations:
Writeup Due:

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 15 July 2026, 16:53