Jan 15: The labs started being posted. All feedback is welcome.

Jan 04: Slides and reading material are being posted. (This is a brand new class and the material is fresh out the oven.) Details about the labs will follow.

So your boss walks in your office and proudly announces he just signed a fat check for a new super-duper computer. Because it is twice as powerful as the current one, he says your software is now going to run that much faster. Question: is that good or bad news?

It used be that that was clearly good news. A more powerful computer meant a faster CPU. And that meant instructions running faster. Our software performance automatically benefited from it.

Well, that is not so anymore. If you're reading this on any relatively modern computer, chances are its clock is between 2 to 3Ghz. The same as last year's modern computer, and also the year before that. What changed is that new computers now bring more "cores" -- several mostly independent CPUs in one chip. Technically, they are faster because they can execute more instructions in the same unit of time. But if you benchmark an "old" application, you'll be surprised to see one core working and all the others idle.

What just happened?! We used to build "sequential" software that consisted mostly of one flow of instructions. Sequential software can't take advantage of several cores at once. We now need to learn how to solve problems and code differently. This course will help it in that in it we will:

Throughout the course, you will work on weekly -- but quite manageable -- coding tasks. These exercises revolve around improving an initially quite simplistic HTTP server written in C++. This kind of software is easily parallelizable, presenting several opportunities for us to apply the ideas seen in class. By the end of the course you would have turned the server into quite a scalable piece of software.

Courant does have a cluster of multicore XEON machines (energon{1-4}.cims). That is the platform we will be coding for.

Please subscribe to the mailing list g22_2631_001_sp10 and feel free to use it to send questions or comments.

The class won't strictly follow any textbook but we will often refer to the first book on this list. I listed other occasional support texts that will be on reserve as well.