Subject: Re: clusters - parallel computing

From: [email-masked]
Date: Fri, 9 Apr 1999 16:25:45 -0500

Hello, Saleh

Thanks for the kind words about my book, and, of course, for using it in
your class.

I do have a fair number of presentations that I do regularly on clusters
and other forms of parallelism. In fact, most of the presentations I give
tend to be generally educational in nature. However, I'm afraid they're not
something I give away. Aside from their being a lot of work to put
together, IBM and/or indirectly me or Prentice Hall (from book copyright)
effectively use them as a means to directly or indirectly make money
through customer and/or sales education. So I'm afraid I'll have to turn
you down on this one.

A suggestion: The issue of educational materials just came up on the
mailing list of the IEEE Task Force on Cluster Computing (TFCC). There are
apparently both some free book copies available and a request to get
organized about collecting notes, presentations, etc. Rajkumar Buyya
<[email-masked]>, the TFCC leader, mentioned the free books;
and Wolfgang Gentzsch <[email-masked]> brought up the issue of other
material, giving an example.

I've copied their mailing list notes below so you can see what's said.
Geoffrey Fox is also on the mailing list, so he should have access to all
this.

Greg Pfister
Senior Technical Staff Member, IBM Advanced Technology & Architecture,
Server Design
(512) 838-8338 | IBM tieline 678-8338 | FAX (512) 838-3418        Sic
Crustulum Frangitur

*****************************

To:   [email-masked]
cc:   [email-masked] (bcc: Greg Pfister/Austin/IBM)
Subject:  TFCC-Education Pormotion Program -- Book Donation

Dear Colleagues:

As you know one of TFCC's goals is to promote:
  Cluster Computing Education
around the world. We are working on building a cluster computing
education website providing pointers to information related to:
  - Cluster books
  - Cluster journals
  - Cluster computing related papers
  - Cluster Resources
  - Cluster Projects
TFCC-Education coordinator, Prof. Barry, is doing good job. Hope
you had change to look at the website recently.

Our new program towards this direction is provide free books to
faculty members around world teaching courses on cluster computing
or encourage them to introduce cluster computing in their
curriculum.

To achieve the above, we need to request book publishers to donate
books to TFCC, which we then distribute to faculties teaching (or
plans to teach) cluster computing. Publishers will agree/happy to
donate when we assure/ensure that books donated by them are used in
developing the course (at least some percent). If you have
authored/coauthored book related to cluster computing, please
request the publisher to donate books to TFCC!

It begins...!!!
---------------

I am happy to inform you that Prentice Hall (www.prenhall/phptr.com)
has agreed to donate books worth of $2600 to TFCC. That is, they are
donating 50 copies of the following (25 each) to TFCC!:

 * High Performance Cluster Computing: Architectures and  Systems,
   Vol.1, Prentice Hall PTR, NJ, USA, 1999. (to be released soon)

 * High Performance Cluster Computing: Programming and Applications,
   Vol.2, Prentice Hall PTR, NJ, USA, 1999. (to be released soon)

Seeking Nomination (you can nominate yourself!)
------------------

Faculties who are teaching subjects like "high-performance
distributed computing", "parallel computing on NOW/clusters",
"cluster computing", "distributed system and Trends", or
seminar-type course, etc., please send your
   - full postal address including phone no.
   - your preference of book (vol.1 or vol.2)
   - it will great if you can let me know the URL of course in which
     you plan to use/will be using the book.

TFCC will make an arrangement for sending the book to you (subjected
to availability). (Like IEEE, we also want to ensure that we donate
more books to underdeveloped/developing countries.) All are
encourage to take benefit of cluster computing education promotion
program of TFCC.

--------------

Authors, please encourage your publishers to donate books to TFCC.

Useful Comments and suggestions are welcome.

Regards

Yours sincerely,
Raj

*************************************************************

Please respond to [email-masked]

To:   [email-masked] (Rajkumar Buyya)
cc:   [email-masked], [email-masked] (bcc: Greg
      Pfister/Austin/IBM)
Subject:  Re: TFCC-Education Pormotion Program -- Book Donation

Dear Rajkumar,

you were just thinking of books for cluster computing education. However,
what about a list of SUITABLE training and education material, especially
web-based?

For example, Genias just recently finished the CEC funded WINPAR Windows
based Parallel Computing Project (see
http://www.geniasoft.com/projects/winpar/ ) with special emphasis on tools
for parallel computing on NT and training. The training and education
material is on  http://winpar.iit.uni-miskolc.hu . Everybody can access it.
We will soon move the webpage to Genias, just for easy access reasons.
Please, have a look.

Regards
Wolfgang

---

From: Saleh Elmohamed <[email-masked]>
Date: Sun, 25 Apr 1999 00:12:02 -0400

Hi Greg,

I hope you don't mind if I bug you one more time ... :)

In page 228 of your book, paragraph 5:

"... The application programmer may eventually have to learn 
how to express queries for best parallel execution, which is a new
discipline but not that much different form learning
the idosyncrasies of any compiler..."

This probably one of the key aspects directly affecting any DB
performance on a cluster or even individual SMPs...

I'd really appreciate it if you could point me out to any current
work on this topic. Particularly, would be interested in those
issues of DB performance on SMPs and how they can be dealt with at 
the code/programming/SW level ...

Any pointers to papers, reports, etc. on this are quite appreciated.

best regards,
Saleh