Algorithms and Parallel Computing

ABOUT THIS BOOK

There is a software gap between hardware potential and the performance that can be attained using today’s software parallel program development tools. The tools need manual intervention by the programmer to parallelize the code. This book is intended to give the programmer the techniques necessary to explore parallelism in algorithms, serial as well as iterative. Parallel computing is now moving from the realm of specialized expensive systems available to few select groups to cover almost every computing system in use today. We can find parallel computers in our laptops, desktops, and embedded in our smart phones. The applications and algorithms targeted to parallel computers were traditionally confined to weather prediction, wind tunnel simulations, computational biology, and signal processing. Nowadays, just about any application that runs on a computer will encounter the parallel processors now available in almost every system.

Parallel algorithms could now be designed to run on special-purpose parallel processors or could run on general-purpose parallel processors using several multilevel techniques such as parallel program development, parallelizing compilers, multithreaded operating systems, and superscalar processors. This book covers the first option: design of special-purpose parallel processor architectures to implement a given class of algorithms. We call such systems accelerator cores. This book forms the basis for a course on design and analysis of ...