Dan Grossman   Teaching Materials

Sophomoric Parallelism and Concurrency

Reading Notes

A Sophomoric Introduction to Shared-Memory Parallelism and Concurrency (pdf)

This document is for students and instructors. It covers the same material as the slides and homeworks in more detail. It is something between lecture notes and a draft of textbook chapters.

Instructors can make variants/extracts using the LaTeX source and several image files:
  sophomoricParallelismAndConcurrency.tex  zip file of images

Context/Motivation

Context and Motivation

The materials on this page offer a 2-3 week unit introducing parallelism and concurrency in a lower-level data structures course. They have been used since Spring 2010 as part of this full data-structures course and have also been adapted for CS2 courses and for introductions in more advanced courses (see "Other Users"). All materials are free and questions/feedback/suggestions are encouraged.

For motivation on incorporating this material in lower-level data structures and a short overview of the approach, see:

All the materials on this page use Java, including Java's ForkJoin Framework, when a particular language or code example is needed. Some of the materials, including the reading notes, have been ported to C++.

Slides

Lecture Slides

In PowerPoint 2007 and pdf

  1. Introduction to Multithreading and Fork-Join Parallelism  pptx  pdf
  2. Analysis of Fork-Join Parallel Programs  pptx  pdf
  3. Parallel Prefix, Pack, and Sorting  pptx  pdf
  4. Shared-Memory Concurrency and Mutual Exclusion  pptx  pdf
  5. Programming with Locks and Critical Sections  pptx  pdf
  6. Data Races and Memory Reordering, Deadlock, Reader/Writer Locks, Condition Variables  pptx  pdf

The breakdown into "lectures" does not exactly map to 1-hour segments; overall there is about 7-8 hours of material divided into 6 lectures.

Java's ForkJoin

Introduction to Java's Fork-Join Framework

Installation instructions and basic usage notes for Java's ForkJoin Framework, written for beginners (html)

These instructions are essential for writing and running real parallel programs using the ForkJoin library, as in the project and some of the homework exercises.

Homework/Project

Homework Problems and Programming Project

Please do not post solutions to these exercises

Homework problems (short paper-and-pencil or simple programming exercises):  pdf  LaTeX source

Java parallel-programming project: html
Compute U.S. population densities with real data. Includes a simple, optional, fun GUI.

Exam

Sample Exam Problems

pdf without solutions   pdf with solutions   LaTeX source

Exam problems used in Spring 2010 or Spring 2012. By design, some of the questions were fairly difficult. Note solutions are posted. The full exams (2010, 2012) also had questions on sorting and graphs, with a 110-minute time limit.

Instructor Workshop

I ran a 3-hour workshop at SIGCSE 2011. The workshop materials are below. They are self-contained with some original content (e.g., new lab exercises) but also substantial overlap with other materials.

Workshop abstract:   Multithreading (Pretty) Early for Everyone: Parallelism and Concurrency in Second-Year Data-Structures
There is wide interest in introducing students to threads earlier, but how? This workshop gives an answer: a 3-week unit in data structures. It should appeal to data-structure instructors and those tasked with curriculum revision. The presenter wrote/used the course materials and advised later instructors. A key approach is to distinguish parallelism (using more resources to solve problems faster) and concurrency (managing shared access to resources). The material is taught via core data-structure topics (asymptotic complexity, sorting, queues, etc.) and using Java and its ForkJoin Framework. Participants will write parallel programs, find concurrency errors, and discuss how the material can fit their needs. Those with or without knowledge of threads and fork-join programming are welcome.

Slides:   pptx   pdf

Installation instructions (to be completed in advance)

Exercises:    pdf   LaTeX    Java   maps   reductions    test output   maps   reductions
The Java files have blank spaces for completing the exercises; testing code is provided. Solutions are available on request.

Other Users

Contact/Feedback

Contact Information / Request for Feedback

Please let me know how you are using these materials and how they can be improved. Even typos are helpful.

spac at cs.washington.edu is a low-traffic mailing list for announcing updates and occasional discussions among users. You can subscribe here or just ask me to subscribe you.

picture of Dan's email address: username djg for UW CSE

Acknowledgments

We gratefully acknowledge gifts from Intel Labs University Collaborations and grants from the U.S. National Science Foundation that provided financial resources to develop these materials.

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Last updated: February 2017

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