This repository contains material required to complete exercises for the Parallel Programming lab in the 2021 summer semester, including assignment sheets and any associated materials. Note that some of this material is based on previous years.
Make sure to read this document carefully, as it contains vital information regarding the grading of exercises.
Generally, topics discussed here include
- parallel programming concepts
- shared memory parallelization using OpenMP
- performance-oriented programming
- proper experiment orchestration and benchmarking
- parallel programming tools
This schedule gives you an overview of the topics we will discuss on each date. It will be updated continuously throughout the semester. Note that exercises associated with a given date are to be discussed on that day, i.e., solutions for that assignment have to be handed in via OLAT by 17:00 on the previous day (Mondays).
| Date | Assignment | Topics |
|---|---|---|
| 2021-03-09 | - | Administrative matters, introduction to LCC2 |
| 2021-03-16 | 1 | Speedup, Amhdal's law, measurements |
| 2021-03-23 | 2 | Sequential performance, cache effects, pthread parallelism |
| 2021-04-13 | 3 | OpenMP parallelism, time measurements, performance analysis |
| 2021-04-20 | 4 | OpenMP affinity, flush, and task parallelism |
| 2021-04-27 | 5 | OpenMP task parallelism and heat stencil application |
| 2021-05-04 | 6 | More OpenMP applications (prefix sum and N-Queens problem) |
| 2021-05-11 | 7 | Vectorization with and without OpenMP |
| 2021-05-18 | 8 | OpenMP correctness, auto-vectorization, dependence analysis |
| 2021-05-25 | 9 | Dependencies, Dependencies, Dependencies |
| 2021-06-01 | 10 | Profiling and optimizing a real application |
| 2021-06-08 | 11 | Scalar architectures and optimizations |
| 2021-06-15 | 12 | N-Body simulation |
| 2021-06-22 | 13 | Linear algebra |
All programming exercise solutions you hand in must compile and run on the LCC2 cluster as described in the LCC2 tutorial. One way way of ensuring this is by developing on LCC2 directly, either through a terminal or using an editor/IDE with support for remote development via SSH (such as Visual Studio Code).
Note that the default version of the GCC compiler present on LCC2 is very
outdated. You may load a never version by calling module load gcc/8.2.0.
As the tutorial states, use job scripts to run your applications on LCC2 compute nodes, do NOT run applications directly on the LCC2 login node.
NOTE: You have to be inside the University network to be able to connect via SSH. See here for more information.
The hostname of LCC2 is lcc2.uibk.ac.at.
All programming exercises are conducted in C or C++.
Your code should always compile without warnings, when passing the flags -Wall -Wextra -Werror -std=gnu11. Error handling is your discretion, but wherever you
do or do not include error handling you need to be able to justify it.
Make sure your code is properly formatted using either your IDE/Text editor of
choice, or by using a tool such as clang-format. You can find an example
.clang-format file in this repository. Failure to
consistently format code may result in lower scores.
Try to write self-documenting code by choosing descriptive variable and
function names. While you may want to add comments to certain sections of your
code, try to avoid trivial comments such as fopen(...); // open file. The best
source code comments are the ones you do NOT need to write. All names and
comments should be written in English.
Finally, all submitted code must be accompanied by a GNU Makefile. That is, your
solution must be able to be compiled with a single call to make. You can find
an example Makefile and more information here.