[Colloq] PhD seminar Tuesday, February 5th 4:30pm

[Rachel Bates]

Ph.D. Seminar Tuesday, February 5th
4:30-5:30pm (PLEASE NOTE TIME CHANGE)
Room 149 Cullinane Hall

Gene Cooperman, "Issues in Parallel Computing"

Some people have argued that we will need parallel computing when Moore's
Law runs out of steam. This talk argues that we need parallel computing
today, precisely because Moore's Law has not run out of steam. If this seems
paradoxical, then observe that the major chip vendors are already
implementing hardware support for parallelism in their next generation
chips:

Intel Itanium   (EPIC: Explicitly Parallel Instruction Computing)
SUN MAJC chip   (TP: Task/Thread Parallelism)

It remains for the software to support this next generation parallel
architecture. A central principle of much work in parallel computing is that
to be economical, it must use commodity hardware. Other issues of parallel
computing (simple programmer's model, parallelization of existing sequential
code, load balancing, checkpointing, marshaling (e.g.:
java.io.Serializable), object-oriented bindings (e.g.: Java RMI), and
others) are discussed in the context of TOP-C (Task Oriented Parallel
C/C++). TOP-C has been developed with these issues in mind over the last
eight years. It supports both distributed and shared memory programming, and
multiple communication protocols.

TOP-C is an example of applied programming languages. In pure programming
languages, if a programming task is difficult, one is allowed to create a
new programming language. In applied programming languages, one must adapt
the mandated programming language to the programming task at hand. As an
example of applied programming languages, TOP-C was used to parallelize
Geant4, and that parallelization will be offered in the next Geant4
distribution. Geant4 (1,000,000 lines of C++ code) was developed at CERN for
simulating particle interactions --- especially in the new collider being
built there --- and makes careful use of object-oriented design principles.

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