Practical Parallel Programming

Book excerpt: Parallel computers have become widely available in recent years. Many scientists are now using them to investigate the grand challenges of science, such as modeling global climate change, determining the masses of elementary particles from first principles, or sequencing the human genome. However, software for parallel computers has developed far more slowly than the hardware. Many incompatible programming systems exist, and many useful programming techniques are not widely known. Practical Parallel Programming provides scientists and engineers with a detailed, informative, and often critical introduction to parallel programming techniques. Following a review of the fundamentals of parallel computer theory and architecture, it describes four of the most popular parallel programming models in use today—data parallelism, shared variables, message passing, and Linda—and shows how each can be used to solve various scientific and numerical problems. Examples, coded in various dialects of Fortran, are drawn from such domains as the solution of partial differential equations, solution of linear equations, the simulation of cellular automata, studies of rock fracturing, and image processing. Practical Parallel Programming will be particularly helpful for scientists and engineers who use high-performance computers to solve numerical problems and do physical simulations but who have little experience of networking or concurrency. The book can also be used by advanced undergraduate and graduate students in computer science in conjunction with material covering parallel architectures and algorithms in more detail. Computer science students will gain a critical appraisal of the current state of the art in parallel programming. Scientific and Engineering Computation series