CM30225 Parallel Computing

Revision Classes

Lectures for this Unit have finished. The remaining time will be used for revision classes and going through past papers.

"He who asks a question is a fool for five minutes, he who does not ask a question remains a fool forever"
Old Chinese proverb.

Using Azure over the Christmas break

The Bath HPC support team will be away over parts of the Christmas break. While we do not anticipate any problems with Azure, do not plan on leaving your runs to the last minute.

Please remember this is a shared resource and be respectful in your use of it.

Lectures

Currently these are scheduled for though this may change.

The Unit

Unit Catalogue

Some Texts

Parallel computing has been around for longer than you think, so there are many books -- just pick one! None I have found matches this course terribly well, but each contains useful bits and pieces. At least for the generalities.

Hardware

Software

Theory

Some links

Wikipedia seems fairly accurate in this area, but you should always treat Wikipedia as a useful source of pointers and follow up the references

Using Azure

Notes on using Azure.

Also see Cloud HPC Home

Your jobs will go into the "cm30225" queue: this is shared by all of you on this unit

If you submit a large number of jobs your priority will decrease to give other people's jobs a chance

Expect the queue to get longer as you approach the hand-in date!

Prof Davenport's notes on MPI

Here are some slides for a course that James Davenport gave on MPI. The target audience was somewhat different to CM30225, but a lot is relevant.

The Coursework

Coursework accounts for 25% of the unit total. It consists of two assignments:

If you have problems accessing Azure, please email hpc-support@bath.ac.uk and give as much detail as you can about the problem. Note this is purely for problems with the machine: any other problems are your own!

There are plenty of resources on available on the Web to help you with both assignments, including standards, manuals and tutorials.

Please do not install any significant software of your own on the cluster: in particular code development environments as these use a lot of CPU and disk, which costs real money.

Programming in C

Some quick notes to remind you about programming in C.

The Exam

At the end of the semester (75%).

Online Past Papers

Past papers

Last year's paper:
2022-2023 semester 1 exam paper

Moodle

Not much on Moodle apart from a link to Panopto/Re:View for a link to the lecture recordings.

All the Slides

All the slides in one big PDF.

Slides

Note that these slides are reminders to me as to what topics I should cover: as with all units you are expected to read around the subject and refer to your lecture notes. Don't treat the slides as the entirety of your study.

The file numbers don't correspond to anything in particular in terms of lectures or subject covered.

I may have skipped some material in lectures: why not improve your general education and read the extra too! The exam will only be set on material covered in the lectures, and your lecture notes will tell you what was covered in lectures.

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