Welcome to the wonderful world of EE563!

The course policy document is here. You are responsible for reading, understanding, and complying with it.

Project 0

This isn't a real project, it is rather a procedure that you should use to check that all is well before attempting Project 1. You do not need to hand in anything for Project 0.

1. Log into your account on bronco.
2. Get a copy of the default SWARC demo code from http://shay.ecn.purdue.edu/~swar/
3. Also get a copy of the Sc.h file there; it contains the MMX macros for the SWARC output.
4. Compile and run this code.

If you wish, instead of using Scc through the WWW interface, you can grab a copy for your own use. Be warned that Scc is still very frail C code, with plenty of bugs, and you should not blindly trust the code it generates. This is a gzip tar file containing a version that is appropriate for use on bronco (or most any unix system, with a few changes). Use tar -zxvf Scc563.tgz to extract the archive, cd Scc, and then make. A good test is Scc test.Sc, which should yield an a.out that, when run, simply prints a={5,6}

Project 1: Thirdy-Something

The first real project of our course uses SIMD multimedia instructions for the innovative purpose of increasing the apparent resolution of LCDs by using third-of-a-pixel rendering techniques. The complete description is thirdy.ps

The support code ppmio.c is also available now.

There is a nice little utility for enlarging subpixels called triple.c that you can use to see how your code works without having an LCD panel. It takes a (subpixel rendered RGB) PPM file and creates a file that represents each pixel by a 3x3 array of pixels containing the usual LCD-like red, green, and blue 1x3 vertical stripes. Displaying an image converted in this way at 1:1 size on a conventional monitor, you will see the desired effect if you step back from the monitor a bit. Note that images appear darker when displayed this way because 2/3 of the display color output is turned off.

Submissions should be sent via email to ee563@ecn.purdue.edu with a subject line containing the character 1. Submit early, submit often... only the last one counts. Each submission should be a "bag" containing the Makefile, source files, and HTML documentation (implementor's notes). The C source code for bag is available here.

Project 2: Sort-Of Something

This project has you sorting lines using shared memory multiprocessing. The complete description is psort.ps

Projects 3+: What You Don't C

This family of projects involves modifying a sequential genetic programming system to work on a variety of parallel architectures.

The sequential source code is gen.c, gen.h, and tree.c. Simply compile these together by: cc gen.c tree.c -o gen -O2

Some notes about this project...

• Compiling for pvm doesn't work quite like on the reference card (not my fault ;-) because the group functions are in a separate archive; compile with both /usr/lib/libpvm3.a and /usr/lib/libgpvm3.a, which you can get by -lpvm3 and -lgpvm3.
• For pvm, you will need to export two environment variables, PVM_HOME should be /usr/pvm3 and PVM_ARCH should be LINUX. See the PVM book, http://www.netlib.org/pvm3/book/pvm-book.html, for details. BTW, if, after starting pvm, pvm_spawn() doesn't work, you can simply run all but one copy of your program in the background, effectively pre-spawning the correct number of tasks.
• In tree.c, the line printf("-%d]);\n", mapmin); should be printf("- %d]);\n", mapmin);; this corrects a problem where --5 is interpreted as an attempt to decrement 5 rather than subtract negative 5. The online version has been fixed.
• If you are not having a lot of fun trying to use LAM MPI, there is also the AFMPI alternative, which runs on top of the AFAPI (e.g., using the SHMAPERS AFAPI). The header file for AFMPI is mpi.h and the C source for AFMPI is mpi.c; that and AFAPI are all you need. You can use trympi.c as a test case to make sure that AFMPI is working for you.

This year is the second time that Programming Parallel Machines (EE563) is using, and requiring students to use, HTML.

A good introduction to using HTML is http://www.ncsa.uiuc.edu/demoweb/html-primer.html.

Various other goodies that might be of interest:

• The home page for the Parallel Processing HOWTO, which loosley covers most of the types of programming models and machines that we will use in this course. This was also handed out as hardcopy in class.
• The home page for PAPERS, Purdue's Adapter for Parallel Execution and Rapid Synchronization, which allows a group of PCs/workstations to function as a fine-grain SIMD/VLIW/MIMD parallel computer.
• A brief, seriously outdated, overview of our Parallel Processing Facilities. At least the PASM description is still valid. ;-)