Curricular Integration is the key

1
Curricular Integration is the key

• David E. Hudak
• Chairman, CS Department
• Ohio Northern University

2
Two approaches to parallelism

• Integration in multiple courses
• Stand-alone class for upperclassmen
• The answer 80/20
• PP technology topics in traditional courses (80)
• A single course allows a focus on the very
  high-end parallel systems used for scientific
  computing (20)

3
Impact of parallel processing?

• Parallel considerations occur at every level of
  the system
• Hardware
• OS
• Language
• Application

4
Hardware Impact

• Two major categories of parallel systems
• SMP (Symmetric Multiprocessing) machines
• Small numbers of processors on same system bus
• Clusters
• Collections of machines connected by network
• Linux examples Beowulf, Legion, PARIS

5
OS Impact

• Microkernel-based OS architecture
• OS-level thread support
• Multiprocessor scheduling algorithms
• Interprocess communication structures
• Added emphasis on synchronization issues

6
Language Impact

• Thread constructs in language
• Thread usage in libraries
• Thread usage by libraries
• Reentrant code (thread safe)
• Distributed objects in Java, C
• CORBA
• Enterprise JavaBeans

7
Application Impact

• Multi-threaded applications
• improved interactivity, performance
• Multi-tier architectures
• Back-end, middleware, front end
• example
• Back-end Access database
• Middleware JavaBeans
• Front-end Dynamic HTML generation for
  e-commerce site (we did a car dealership)