CS240A Assignment 1: Describe a Parallel Application

This is a warm-up exercise to summarize the state of current parallel applications. The summaries may help you or your classmates choose final projects.

Results

Due Date: 5 April, 2010

Problem

Examine an application problem for which parallel computing has been used. You may pick a problem from your own research area, somewhere on the web, or elsewhere (so long as it is verifiable). Build a web page briefly describing the application, the use of parallelism, and a frank assessment of its success, weaknesses, and challenges.

Some specific details to consider include the following:

• What is the scientific or engineering problem being solved?
• How well did the application achieve its scientific / engineering objective? Are simulation results compared to physical results?
• What type of parallel platform was the application developed for? (distributed vs. shared memory, vector, etc.) What tools were used to build the application? (languages, libraries, etc.)
• If the application is run on a major supercomputer, where does that computer rank on the Top 500 list?
• How well did the application perform? How does this compare to the platform's best possible performance?
• Does the application "scale" to large problems on many processors? If you believe it has not, what bottlenecks may have limited its performance?

Not all of these details will be available for all applications. You ought to explain what you find noteworthy about the application or its implementation.

Submission

Mail the URL for your web page to both John and Hans. We will post links to everyone's submissions on the course web page.

Resources

Besides your advisor and Google, you may want to start looking from

• The San Diego Supercomputing Center.
• NERSC, the DOE supercomputing center at Lawrence Berkeley Labs.
• The California Nanosystems Institute here at UCSB.
• The annual Supercomputing Conference.