This course will be very useful for your future career and job hunting. The technology is moving toward multiple cores and parallel systems, even a simple PC having a multi-core CPU now. Check that Intel is building 80-core procerror. Do you know how to program them? So don't miss this only chance in UTD to learn the knowledge.
There will be no in-class exams. The focus will be some interesting homework projects and term projects.
A comprehensive study of the fundamentals of parallel systems and architecture. Topics including parallel programming environment, fine-grain parallelism such as VLIW (used in DSP processors) and superscalar, parallel computing paradigm of shared-memory, distributed-memory, data-parallel and data-flow models, interconnection networks, optical computing, systolic arrays, cache coherence, compiling techniques to improve parallelism, scheduling theory, loop transformations, loop parallelizations, real-time systems, and run-time systems.
The department has offered virtually no course about parallel architectures and systems, which is an extrememly important in computer science and engineering. Don't miss this chance. It will be very useful for your future career or advanced research because nowadays it is very common that high-performance systems such as Network Routers, DSP systems involve multiple processors or functional units. This course will include software systems, parallel programming languages, parallel embedded systems, real-time systems, interconnection networks, and parallel architectures.
My style of graduate teaching is to give students motivations and directions. There will be no in-class exams. A few interesting homework will be given and term projects will be developed through a team work. Students will give presentations in class. I hope it is not a big class because I like to know each student personally in class. You will find that this course will be quite different from other grad. courses offered in UTD. And I am sure that you will enjoy it. Feel free to come to chat with me at anytime for anything.
The students should know basic computer organizations, basic concepts of operating systems such as threads and virtual memory. If you have any questions, let me know.
Revised by Edwin Sha - 2006.