This document provides an introduction to parallel computing, including motivations, scope, and challenges. It discusses how parallelism can accelerate computing speeds to overcome limitations in processor clock speeds and memory/disk speeds. Parallelism is motivated by applications in engineering, science, commerce, computer systems, and data science that require processing large datasets or performing computationally-intensive tasks. It outlines several examples of parallel applications in different domains.
This document provides an introduction to parallel computing, including motivations, scope, and challenges. It discusses how parallelism can accelerate computing speeds to overcome limitations in processor clock speeds and memory/disk speeds. Parallelism is motivated by applications in engineering, science, commerce, computer systems, and data science that require processing large datasets or performing computationally-intensive tasks. It outlines several examples of parallel applications in different domains.
This document provides an introduction to parallel computing, including motivations, scope, and challenges. It discusses how parallelism can accelerate computing speeds to overcome limitations in processor clock speeds and memory/disk speeds. Parallelism is motivated by applications in engineering, science, commerce, computer systems, and data science that require processing large datasets or performing computationally-intensive tasks. It outlines several examples of parallel applications in different domains.
This document provides an introduction to parallel computing, including motivations, scope, and challenges. It discusses how parallelism can accelerate computing speeds to overcome limitations in processor clock speeds and memory/disk speeds. Parallelism is motivated by applications in engineering, science, commerce, computer systems, and data science that require processing large datasets or performing computationally-intensive tasks. It outlines several examples of parallel applications in different domains.
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Introduction to Parallel Computing
(Motivation, Scope & Challenges)
Motivating Parallelism
Parallelism = Opportunities + Challenges
• Some real life examples of parallelism are-
– House Construction: Several workers can perform separate tasks simultaneously, such as wiring, plumbing, furnace duct installation, etc. – Call Center: Many employees are servicing customers at the same time. Motivating Parallelism Forms of parallelism are different. • The call center, differs from home construction in a fundamental way: – Calls are generally independent, and can be serviced in any order with little interaction among the workers. – In construction, some tasks can be performed simultaneously —wiring and plumbing—while others are ordered—framing must precede wiring. – The ordering restricts how much parallelism can be applied at once, limiting the speed at which a construction project can be completed. – It also increases the degree of interaction among the workers. Motivating Parallelism
• The role of parallelism in accelerating computing speeds
has been recognized for several decades.
• Its role in providing multiplicity of datapaths and
increased access to storage elements has been significant in commercial applications.
• The scalable performance and lower cost of parallel
platforms is reflected in the wide variety of applications. Motivating Parallelism • Developing parallel hardware and software has traditionally been time and effort intensive.
• If one is to view this in the context of rapidly improving
uniprocessor speeds, one is tempted to question the need for parallel computing.
• There are some unmistakable trends in hardware
design, which indicate that uniprocessor (or implicitly parallel) architectures may not be able to sustain the rate of realizable performance increments in the future. Motivating Parallelism
• This is the result of a number of fundamental physical
and computational limitations.
• The emergence of standardized parallel programming
environments, libraries, and hardware have significantly reduced time to (parallel) solution. The Computational Power Argument
Moore's law states [1965]:
``The complexity for minimum component costs
has increased at a rate of roughly a factor of two per year. Certainly over the short term this rate can be expected to continue, if not to increase. Over the longer term, the rate of increase is a bit more uncertain, although there is no reason to believe it will not remain nearly constant for at least 10 years..'' That means by 1975, the number of components per integrated circuit for minimum cost will be 65,000 The Computational Power Argument
In 1975, he revised this law as follows:
``There is no room left to squeeze anything out by being clever. Going forward from here we have to depend on the two size factors - bigger dies and finer dimensions.'' He revised his rate of circuit complexity doubling to 18 months and projected from 1975 onwards at this reduced rate. The Computational Power Argument • A die in the context of integrated circuits is a small block of semiconducting material, on which a given functional circuit is fabricated. • By 2004, clock frequencies had gotten fast enough- around 3 GHz that any further increases would have caused the chips to melt from the heat they generated. • So while the manufacturers continued to increase the number of transistors per chip, they no longer increased the clock frequencies. Instead, they started putting multiple processor cores on the chip. The Computational Power Argument
• If one is to buy into Moore's law, the question still
remains - how does one translate transistors into useful OPS (operations per second)?
• The logical recourse is to rely on parallelism, both
implicit and explicit.
• Most serial (or seemingly serial) processors rely
extensively on implicit parallelism.
• In this course we will focus mostly on explicit parallelism.
The Computational Power Argument
• Implicit parallelism is a characteristic of a programming
language that allows a compiler or interpreter to automatically exploit the parallelism inherent to the computations expressed by some of the language’s constructs. • A pure implicitly parallel language does not need special directives, operators or functions to enable parallel execution. • Explicit parallelism is the representation of concurrent computations by means of primitives in the form of special-purpose directives or function calls. The Memory/Disk Speed Argument • While clock rates of high-end processors have increased at roughly 40% per year over the past decade, DRAM access times have only improved at the rate of roughly 10% per year over this interval.
• This mismatch in speeds causes significant performance
bottlenecks.
• Parallel platforms provide increased bandwidth to the
memory system. The Memory/Disk Speed Argument
• Parallel platforms also provide higher aggregate caches.
• Principles of locality of data reference and bulk access,
which guide parallel algorithm design also apply to memory optimization.
• Some of the fastest growing applications of parallel
computing utilize not their raw computational speed, rather their ability to pump data to memory and disk faster. The Data Communication Argument • As the network evolves, the vision of the Internet as one large computing platform has emerged.
• This view is exploited by applications such as
SETI@home and Folding@home.
• In many other applications (typically databases and data
mining) the volume of data is such that they cannot be moved.
• Any analyses on this data must be performed over the
network using parallel techniques. The Data Communication Argument • The search for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI) is the collective name for a number of activities undertaken to search for intelligent extraterrestrial life.
• Folding@home is a distributed computing project for
disease research that simulates protein folding, computational drug design, and other types of molecular dynamics. The project uses the idle processing resources of thousands of personal computers owned by volunteers who have installed the software on their systems. Scope of Parallel Computing Applications
• Parallelism finds applications in very diverse application
domains for different motivating reasons.
• These range from improved application performance to
cost considerations. Applications in Engineering and Design • Design of airfoils (optimizing lift, drag, stability), internal combustion engines (optimizing charge distribution, burn), high-speed circuits (layouts for delays and capacitive and inductive effects), and structures (optimizing structural integrity, design parameters, cost, etc.).
• Design and simulation of micro- and nano-scale
systems.
• Process optimization, operations research.
Scientific Applications • Functional and structural characterization of genes and proteins. • Advances in computational physics and chemistry have explored new materials, understanding of chemical pathways, and more efficient processes. • Applications in astrophysics have explored the evolution of galaxies, thermonuclear processes, and the analysis of extremely large datasets from telescopes. • Weather modeling, mineral prospecting, flood prediction, etc., are other important applications. • Bioinformatics and astrophysics also present some of the most challenging problems with respect to analyzing extremely large datasets. Commercial Applications • Some of the largest parallel computers power the wall street!
• Data mining and analysis for optimizing business and
marketing decisions.
• Large scale servers (mail and web servers) are often
implemented using parallel platforms.
• Applications such as information retrieval and search are
typically powered by large clusters. Applications in Computer Systems • Network intrusion detection, cryptography, multiparty computations are some of the core users of parallel computing techniques.
• Embedded systems increasingly rely on distributed
control algorithms.
• A modern automobile consists of tens of processors
communicating to perform complex tasks for optimizing handling and performance.
overlay networks and utilize algorithms directly from parallel computing. Applications in Data Science
• Data is too big to be processed and analyzed in one
single machine.
• Parallel computing in distributed file systems: Googles
distributed file systems and programming model, Google File System (GFS, 2003) and the MapReduce, have addressed the problems of distributed computations and processing failure recovery. Applications in Data Science
• In memory parallel computing: New large-scale data
processing frameworks, such as Apache Spark & H20, and their new DataFrame & Datasets APIs have been proposed to deal with such distributed big data analytics tasks.
• Database parallel computing: Greenplum Database is an
advanced open source data platform. It provides powerful and rapid analytics on PETABYTE SCALE data volumes. Thank You