Thinking in Parallel - Introduction New Mexico Supercomputing Challenge in partnership with Intel Corp. and NM EPSCoR

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Agenda Define parallel computing. Explain how to identify opportunities for parallelism. Introduce three main methodologies.

What Is Parallel Computing? Attempt to speed solution of a task by: Dividing task into sub-tasks Executing sub-tasks simultaneously on multiple processors Parallelization requires both: Understanding of where parallelism can be effective Knowledge of how to design and implement good solutions

Identifying parallelism opportunities Study problem – including existing code (if any). Look for opportunities to perform multiple tasks at the same time (parallelism), in order to: Try to keep all processors busy doing useful work. Solve the problem faster.

Three main methodologies Domain decomposition – Used when the same operation is performed on a large number of similar data items. Task decomposition – Used when some different operations can be performed at the same time. Pipelining – Used when there are sequential operations on a large amount of data.