Overview

The modern computing is all about the distributed. Big Data, Machine Learning, Systems – all these new and fancy subjects require us to leverage the power of many available cores and devices. This course aims to provide a background in parallel programming and concurrent and distributed computing. Students will learn how to structure, write, run and debug multithreaded applications in Java. More importantly, they will also learn how to reason about the code running in parallel to ensure desired safety and liveness properties in the scalable way without sacrificing the performance. As a teaser, by the end of the course students are introduced to the distributed computing.

The course builds from the classical model of computation with a single processor and a memory and iteratively introduces one more bit of the complexity at once. First, the course explores the effects of introducing several processors into the computation model but keeping a shared memory. Then, the course explores the effects of removing the shared memory. And, finally, the course explores the effects of failures on the computation model.

On a practical side, the course includes a lot of labs and programming exercises to ensure enough hands-on experience. Performance matters are covered as well, delivering basic performance analysis capabilities to the students.