

Heterogeneous Parallel Programming - ColinWright
https://www.coursera.org/course/hetero

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wetherbeei
As a researcher in Wen-Mei's group at UIUC and having taken this class, I can
say this is one of the best classes for gaining practical knowledge of exactly
how to parallelize and distribute massive computational problems across GPUs
and multiple nodes. The knowledge is very applicable, and the machine problems
are well thought out to introduce the common parallel operations and
optimizations.

For the final project I replaced the NPC AI in Half-Life 2 so that the optimal
position calculations ran on the GPU and took into account many more
parameters than the CPU version.

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ryanmolden
Yeah, I signed up for this, looks fun. I was a bit bummed that there is a new
edition of the textbook they recommend that appears to be due out in December.
Poor timing relative to this class :(

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rabidsnail
MPI? I thought that went the way of CORBA. Is there any reason to use MPI
over, say, ZeroMQ and Thrift/ProtoBuf/JSON/Whatever?

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rglullis
How are the bindings for Thrift/ProtoBuf/JSON in FORTRAN 77, which still runs
the good majority of scientific applications that require large-scale
clusters?

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rabidsnail
That's fair. It's not very useful to me, but if you work at JPL I can see why
you would still use it.

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ryanmolden
Cray also uses MPI afaik, so if you are using big-iron you may see it, this
would include JPL as well as pretty much all the three-letter agencies under
the DOD umbrella I suspect.

