Overview

Modern computing is all about distribution. 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 students with background knowledge 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 that the desired safety and liveness properties are present in a scalable way without sacrificing performance. As a teaser, by the end of the course students are introduced to distributed computing.

The course builds on the classical model of computation with a single processor and memory, and iteratively introduces one more bit of complexity at once. First, the course explores the effects of introducing several processors into the computational model while keeping a shared memory. Then, the course explores the effects of replacing the shared memory model with the message-passing model (as in distributed computing). If time permits, the effects of failures on the computational model will be discussed.

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