Parallelism and Concurrency - EPFL Course, Spring 2016

CS 206 - Spring Semester, 2nd year undergraduate course

Course Book Description

Main reading material: Learning Concurrent Programming in Scala

• Grading Interface
• For more details scroll down to the “Getting Started” section under the heading “Part II: Concurrent Programming”

Parts of this course will run through Coursera, https://www.coursera.org/learn/parprog1/

Students taking this course are requested to provide their Coursera account email by filling up this google form. Note that Coursera requires you to only have one account.

Please note that, when using Coursera, you can choose “I don't want to verify” and “Continue without verification” and you will receive assignment submission tokens that have no time limits, which will simplify the use of the system for this course.

There are three main parts of the course:

• Parallelism (first four weeks): lectures as live lectures and MOOC videos, assignment submission through Coursera
• Concurrency: lectures as live lectures
• Big Data Analysis with Scala and Spark (last three weeks): MOOC

In any case, there will be programming assignments that you will be submitting online.

Continuous control. Components of the grade include:

• written exams during the semester (midterm counting 35%, and the final counting 40% of the grade)
• small programming projects during the semester (all together counting 25% of the grade)

Assignment Due Dates:

• a) Assignment 1: 9th March.
• b) Assignment 2: 19th March (the deadline was relaxed for a few students who had problems with grading infrastructure)
• c) Assignment 3: 23rd March
• d) Assignment 4: 6th April
• e) Assignment 5: 21st April
• f) Assignment 6: 4th May
• g) Assignment 7: 12th May
• h) Assignment 8: 3rd June
• i) Assignment 9: 3rd June

Course Calendar Available from this Link

• Click Here for Slides
• Parallel Programming Channel
• Coursera page

Combined PDF Slides for Week 1

• Course introduction and introduction to parallelism
• JVM and parallelism
• Basic parallel Construct. Array sum example v
• Example: estimating the value of pi
• First-class tasks v
• How fast are parallel programs? v
• Benchmarking parallel programs

• Example: Merge Sort
• Parallel mapping
• Reductions (fold)
• Associativity
• Parallel scan left

Reading:

• Prefix Sums and Their Applications by Guy E. Blelloch

• Data-Parallel Programming
• Data-Parallel Operations I
• Data-Parallel Operations II
• Scala Parallel Collections
• Splitters and Combiners

• Implementing Combiners
• Two-Phase Construction
• Conc-Trees
• Amortized Conc-Tree Appends
• Conc-Tree Combiners

• Review of the material (e.g. more on associativity)

• Concurrency 1: Chapter 2 of Learning Concurrent Programming in Scala Slides

• Grading Infrastructure

• Assignment 5 - Concurrency: Problem Statement and Handout

• Concurrency 2: Chapter 3 of Learning Concurrent Programming in Scala Slides
  • Documentation of Java Memory Model (an older PDF document)

• Setting up Assignment 6

• Assignment 6 - Lock-free Sorted List - Problem Statement and Handout

• Concurrency 3: Chapter 4 of Learning Concurrent Programming in Scala Slides

Slides on implementing futures

• 14:15: Actors 1
• Click here for Video lectures on Actors - Part 1
• 16:00 MIDTERM EXAM
• Midterm exam will happen in Rooms INF 1 and INF 2 the usual lab rooms
• A Sample Associativity Exercise with Solution

• Assignment 7 - Binary Trees Using Actors - Problem Statement and Handout

• Actors 2
• Click here for Video lectures on Actors - Part 2
• Click here for Video lectures on Actors - Part 3
• Slides on actors are available in the google drive: Course Slides

• NO LIVE LECTURE. See the video and the slides.
• Spark Lecture 1 v
• Slides slides

• Assignment 8 - Stackoverflow - Problem Statement and Handout

• Live Lecture by Heather Miller
• Assignment 9 - Wikipedia - Problem Statement and Handout
• slides1 slides2

• Live Lecture by Heather Miller
• Revisiting joins (updated last week's slides1)
• Shuffles, closures, and shared variables (continuing with slides2 from last week)

• 15:15 Office hours in INF 3
• Sample questions and answers from last year's quiz of a similar course QuestionsSolutions

• 16:00 FINAL EXAM INF 1 and INF 2