Original Author/link
Oklahoma Supercomputing Center for Educaton and Research (OSCER)
“Supercomputing in Plain English” - “Distributed Multiprocessing”, Slide 26.
CS2013 Knowledge Unit Coverage
Parallel Architecture (Elective)
8. Describe the key performance challenges in different memory and distributed system topologies. [Familiarity]
TCPP Topics Coverage
Architecture Topics
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Know Message passing (no shared memory) Latency: Know the concept, implications for scaling, impact on work/communication ratio to achieve speedup.
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Know Message passing (no shared memory) Bandwidth: Know the concept, how it limits sharing, and considerations of data movement cost.
Recommended Courses
- Authors present the analogy to attendees of their “Supercomputing in Plain English” workshop series. According to (Neeman2008), the concepts have been presented to students as young as elementary school to adult attendees.
Accessibility
Many younger students may struggle with this analogy. The age of cell phones and “unlimited” plans have hidden the notion of “long distance” costs and connection costs from students. In order to use this analogy, it is recommended that instructors first explain how phone calls used to be made.
Assessment
Unknown. (Neeman2006) describes the different analogies. There is no assessment provided in (Neeman2006) or (Neeman2008).
Citations
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OSCER. “Shared Memory Multithreading”. Supercomputing in Plain English: A High Performance Computing Workshop Series. Online, last accessed 5 November 2019. http://www.oscer.ou.edu/Workshops/SharedMemoryParallelism/sipe_sharedmem_20180227.pdf
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H. Neeman, L. Lee, J. Mullen, and G. Newman, “Analogies for teaching parallel computing to inexperienced programmers”, in Working Group Reports on ITiCSE on Innovation and Technology in Computer Science Education, ser. ITiCSE-WGR'06. New York, NY, USA: ACM, 2006, pp. 64–67. Available: http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/1189215.1189172
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H. Neeman, H. Severini, and D. Wu, “Supercomputing in plain english: Teaching cyberinfrastructure to computing novices” SIGCSE Bull., vol. 40, no. 2, pp. 27–30, June 2008. Available: http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/1383602.1383628