ENEE759K/CMSC751: Parallel Algorithms, Spring 2010

This page will be updated frequently during the progress of the course. The updates will include links to corrections and some announcements.

Contact: Please see each specific programming assignment for contact information.

04/22/2010 Programming assignment HW6A: Connectivity and HW6B: Tuning BFS has been posted under Assignments. Due date: 5/11/10. Please note that this is a two-part assignment. Both parts are required for full credit.
04/08/2010 Programing assingment HW5: Summation Fine-Tuning has been posted under "Assignments". Due date: 4/23/10.
03/25/2010 Programming assignment HW4: Breadth-First Search has been posted under "Assignments". Due date: 4/9/10.
03/10/2010 Programming assignment HW3: Integer and Radix Sorting has been posted under "Assignments". Due date: 3/26/10.
03/02/2010 Important announcement about the HW2: Selection please click here
02/24/2010 We recenly upgraded the XMTC compiler on the Paraleap server. Please read this announcement for clarifications.
02/24/2010 Programming assignment HW2: Selection has been posted under "Assignments". Due date: 3/12/2010.
02/08/2010 Programming assignment HW1: Matvec has been posted under "Assignments". Due date: 2/23/2010.
02/03/2010 A quick XMT tools reference "XMT Quick Reference" has been posted under "Additional Helpful Documents".
02/03/2010 Solving the programming assignments will require remotely working on a Linux computer. If you are unfamiliar with this environment, I recommend reading the "Simple Unix Tutorial" found under the "Additional Helpful Documents" section before starting anything else. You can then proceed to the XMT-C Tutorial and Manual as needed.

Information about XMTC Compiler Upgrade

Please read the following information regarding a recent update to the XMTC compiler installed on the Paraleap server.

Subject: Information About the xmtcc compiler

Dear Students,
I am Alex Tzannes and maintain the xmtcc compiler with George Caragea. I am always interested in knowing if you encounter bugs or have things you would like to see fixed in xmtcc. Realize however that xmtcc is a research compiler so don't expect the stability and maturity of a production compiler and be extra careful when writing code as to what is supported by the compiler. Unfortunately the
error checking is far from perfect and if you use unsupported features chances are you will not get a compilation error, or at least not one you will be able to understand... :) So for example don't use floats or doubles!!

The compiler you used for the first homework assignment (matvec) didn't include some upgrades made since the last time the class was given (spring 09). I have updated the compiler so next time you use xmtcc you will be able to take advantage of those upgrades. The upgrades mainly focus on minor bug fixes and better error reporting.

You can switch back to the old version of the compiler (the one you used for matvec) by using the following command on the command line:
PATH=/opt/xmt/xmtcc.r5360/bin:${PATH}

This prepends to your PATH environment variable the path of the old compiler. This syntax works for the bash shell which is your default shell. If you figured out how to change your shell you can also figure out how to adapt the above command. Keep in mind that you will have to issue that command each time you log in to switch back to the old compiler, but you shouldn't need to do so.

To find out which 'xmtcc' will be called when you run the compiler you can issue:
which xmtcc

I encourage everybody to test the new xmtcc compiler on their matvec assignment to make sure the compiler works and the cycle counts are the same. I don't expect any differences with the old compiler but we are better off caching any such problems early on. If anyone encounters problems please contact me by email (having [ParAlg] in the subject line will also help me).

Best,
Alex