Parallel Programing basics from MIT

[nickoppen]

Hi,

There's been lots of posts about where to learn about using multicore hardware. I stumbled across the Multicore Programming Primer from MIT on iTunes U. It was a course run a couple of years ago at MIT for people who already are competent programmers who wanted to get in at the deep end using the IBM Cell processor. While the Cell seems way more sophisticated than the Epiphany processor they covered a lot of material that is general in nature. There are also a number of similarities that would mean that techniques used on the Cell would be equally applicable to Epiphany (e.g. using the DMA channels to prefetch the next work unit while working on the current unit).

It's funny, they talk about the Cell being "bare metal" programming without all the modern conveniences. I'm wondering how they would describe the Epiphany!

nick

[nickoppen]

Another course available through iTunes U and directly off the web is from the Hasso Plattner Intitut at the University of Potsdam in Germany. Thirteen lectures in all with a degree of overlap with the MIT course in the early stages but covering a broader range of topics including a number of programming languages (OpenCL, Scala/Erlang, OpenMP, Java etc.). Most of the lectures are in English and some are in German. The full lectures (around 1:30mins each) are broken down into smaller chunks so if you are interested in only one part you can pick out the bits that you are interested in (e.g. 15 minutes in two bits about OpenCL).


The full course can been seen here: