CS240A Resource Page
Machine documentation
MPI language resources
MPI is the lowest common denominator of parallel programming, a standard
implementation of the message-passing programming model (which dates back
to the first commercial parallel machines in the 1980s) that has been
augmented with some newer constructs like collectives
(such as broadcast and global sum) and one-sided communication.
The great advantages of MPI are that it runs on practically any parallel
machine you can name, and it gives you very detailed control over all
the communication that happens in your program.
UPC language resources
UPC (universal parallel C) is a language that combines much of the
ease of use of the shared-memory programming model with the ability to
control data locality for performance on a distributed-memory machine.
You can download and install a UPC compiler on pretty much any parallel
machine; it will also be available on some of the SDSC machines.
Cilk++ language resources
Cilk++ is a version of C and C++ that has been extended for
shared-memory parallel programming, targeted especially at
multicore and manycore chips.
You can download the academic version of Cilk for any multicore
(or even single-core) Windows or Linux machine, including your
laptop or lab workstation.
It will also be available at SDSC on the Triton machine
and in the Computer Science Graduate Student Lab.
Books on parallel computing
- Lin, C., and Snyder, L. 2008. Principles of Parallel Programming, Addison Wesley.
- Mattson, T. G., Sanders, B. A., and Massingill, B. L. 2004. Patterns for Parallel Programming, Addison Wesley.
- Grama, A., Gupta, A., Karypis, G., and Kumar, V. 2003. Introduction to Parallel Computing, Second Edition, Addison Wesley.
- Dongarra, J., et al. 2002. The Sourcebook of Parallel Computing, Morgan Kaufmann.
- Goedecker, S., and Hoisie, A. 2001. Performance Optimization of Numerically Intensive Codes, Society for Industrial Mathematics.
- Foster, I. 1995. Designing and Building Parallel Programs, Addison Wesley, also available online.
General programming and data structures resources
- One resource available to UCSB students is a fairly large
collection of the O'Reilly books that we have free online access to via
this link from on campus or
this link from off campus.
Within this collection are many good books that provide introduction to
C, Unix, etc.
You can use the "search" window to find books on specific topics--and
one nice feature is that you can cut and paste code samples.
Numerical algorithms resources
- J. Shewchuk, An
introduction to the conjugate gradient method without the agonizing pain.
What it says. A good paper.
- J. Demmel,
Applied
Numerical Linear Algebra. SIAM, 1997.
This is a wonderful book and you should buy it if you plan
to do anything in computational science or numerical analysis.
- Y. Saad,
Iterative
Methods for Linear Systems. SIAM, second edition 2003.
The first edition is available
online
without charge.
- R. Barrett and 9 other authors,
Templates
for the Solution of Linear Systems:
Building Blocks for Iterative Methods. SIAM, 1994.
Available
online.
This contains very concise but very useful descriptions of many
iterative methods.
- W. Briggs, V. Henson, and S. McCormick.
A
Multigrid Tutorial. SIAM, second edition 2000.
A superb tutorial. The text isn't online but this home
page includes an excellent set of slides that follows the book.
- See
this list for more references.
Interesting links
Similar courses elsewhere and elsewhen
- Applied Parallel Computing, MIT
(link)
- Applications of Parallel Computers, UC Berkeley
(link)
- The 2007 version of CS240A
(link)
- CS140, the undergraduate version of this class
(link)