Basic HTML version of Foils prepared 24 August 98

Foil 38 Pleasingly Parallel Algorithms

From Master Foilset for CPS615 Introduction -- Material from Culler and Koelbel Computational Science for Simulations -- Fall Semester 1998. by Geoffrey C. Fox, Nancy McCracken


Many applications are what is called (essentially) embarrassingly or more kindly pleasingly parallel
These are made up of independent concurrent components
  • Each client independently accesses a Web Server
  • Each roll of a Monte Carlo dice (random number) is an independent sample
  • Each stock can be priced separately in a financial portfolio
  • Each transaction in a database is almost independent (a given account is locked but usually different accounts are accessed at same time)
  • Different parts of Seismic data can be processed independently
In contrast points in a finite difference grid (from a differential equation) canNOT be updated independently
Such problems are often formally data-parallel but can be handled much more easily -- like functional parallelism



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