I've come to the end of my Summer semester and "Parallel Algorithm Design". All of my assignments have been turned in and graded. I have turned in my semester project (a parallel web crawler that crawls the web for links). All that is left is my final exam. If I haven't got it now, I'll never have it.
You might wonder, what in the heck is "Parallel Algorithm Design". If you really want to know, wikipedia's article gives a fairly good, concise explanation. There are also articles about OpenMP, POSIX Threads, MPI, Hadoop and BOINC. These are some of the "fascinating" topics I've been learning about. If you want it in my layman's terms, imagine a home builder. A sequential program is like a builder that builds one house at a time. While you need some skill to do this, its a fairly simple concept. A parallel program is like a construction company with superintendents. The superintendents operate on their own, building homes, and have to figure out how to share subs and other resources. Because of this "parallel building", a company with superintendents can build more homes. In short, parallel programming is harder to do but gets more done.
That's about as short a description of this semester as I can get. Its been an interesting and challenging semester. All I have left is the final exam this week. I'm ready to get it over with and face the fall head on!!!
You might wonder, what in the heck is "Parallel Algorithm Design". If you really want to know, wikipedia's article gives a fairly good, concise explanation. There are also articles about OpenMP, POSIX Threads, MPI, Hadoop and BOINC. These are some of the "fascinating" topics I've been learning about. If you want it in my layman's terms, imagine a home builder. A sequential program is like a builder that builds one house at a time. While you need some skill to do this, its a fairly simple concept. A parallel program is like a construction company with superintendents. The superintendents operate on their own, building homes, and have to figure out how to share subs and other resources. Because of this "parallel building", a company with superintendents can build more homes. In short, parallel programming is harder to do but gets more done.
That's about as short a description of this semester as I can get. Its been an interesting and challenging semester. All I have left is the final exam this week. I'm ready to get it over with and face the fall head on!!!
Jim,
ReplyDeleteI am sure you'll be fine. Let us know how the final comes out.
Shane (Go Knights c/o '84)
http://bdgjm.blogpost.com