Fall 2013 coverage

The final will be comprehensive and include from the topics listed below:

Amdahl's Law
MIPS
MFLOPS
false sharing
memory consistency



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CPSC 330 - Fall 2011
Study Guide for Final Exam


Amdahl's Law, MIPS, and MFLOPS will be counted in the Exam 1 material.


1. Be able to define or match these terms

     coarse-grained parallelism
     fine-grained parallelism
     compute-dominant workload
     communication-dominant workload
     embarrassingly parallel

     Flynn notation (SISD, SIMD, MIMD)
     single-instruction-multiple-data (SIMD)
       - muliple processor units operating in lockstep (historical)
       - subword parallelism in a partitioned ALU (such as MMX/SSE)

     shared memory
     distributed memory
     non-uniform memory access (NUMA)
     cache-coherent non-uniform memory access (CC-NUMA)
     massively parallel processing (MPP)

     multicore
     symmetric multiprocessor (SMP)
     vector processor
     GPU (graphics processing unit)
     cluster

     OpenMP
     MPI (message passing interface)


2. Be able to:

   A. Identify and explain several different ways in which a computer
      system exploits parallelism.  For example, this includes but is
      not limited to:
      - parallel-by-bit in a parallel adder versus a serial adder
      - subword parallelism in a partitioned adder
      - instruction processing overlap in pipelines, superscalars, VLIWs
      - wide buses versus narrower buses with shared address/data lines
      - burst transfers to/from interleaved memory modules
      - nonblocking caches
      - multicore processors
      - GPUs
      - clusters

   B. Identify and compare relative amounts of computation and communication
      in code segments.

   C. Identify a multicore, cluster, or other computer systems as UMA, NUMA,
      CC-NUMA or NORMA.

   D. Identify a multicore, cluster, or other computer systems as SISD, SIMD,
      MISD, or MIMD.

   E. Explain how a cluster differs from an SMP in terms of ld/st memory
      accesses and processor interconnections.

   F. Identify OpenMP, MPI, or other programming style as being based on a
      shared memory model (UMA/NUMA) or distributed memory model (NORMA).