This is a warm-up exercise to summarize the state of current parallel applications. The summaries may help you or classmates choose final projects. This assignment is for 4-unit students only.
First, include a brief bio of you, your research interests, and what you'd like to get out of the class. This will help us form initial assignment groups, and later this will help you find project partners.
Examine an application problem for which parallel computing has been used. You may pick a problem from your own research area, somewhere on the web, or elsewhere (so long as it is verifiable). Briefly describe the application, the use of parallelism, and a frank assessment of its success, weaknesses, and challenges.
Some specific details to consider include the following:
What is the scientific or engineering problem being solved?
How well did the application achieve its scientific/engineering objective? Are simulation results compared to physical results?
What parallel platform has the application targeted? (distributed vs. shared memory, vector, etc.) What tools were used to build the application? (languages, libraries, etc.)
If the application is run on a major supercomputer, where does that computer rank on the Top 500 list?
How well did the application perform? How does this compare to the platform's best possible performance?
Does the application "scale" to large problems on many processors? If you believe it has not, what bottlenecks may have limited its performance?
Not all of these details will be available for all applications. You ought to explain what you find noteworthy about the application or its implementation.
Besides your advisor and Google, you may want to start looking from
Our local DOE supercomputing center NERSC; and
The yearly Supercomputing Conference.
The results from previous classes also may help:
Berkeley students please submit a PDF file (only PDF will be accepted) at which the GSIs can retrieve your work to bCourses. The submissions will be copied and posted under the class's page, so do not include information you wish to keep private.