Roman Trobec - Introduction to Parallel Computing

Advisory Board

Samson Abramsky, University of Oxford, Oxford, UK

Chris Hankin, Imperial College London, London, UK

Mike Hinchey, University of Limerick, Limerick, Ireland

Dexter C. Kozen, Cornell University, Ithaca, USA

Andrew Pitts, University of Cambridge, Cambridge, UK

Hanne Riis Nielson, Technical University of Denmark, Kongens Lyngby, Denmark

Steven S. Skiena, Stony Brook University, Stony Brook, USA

Iain Stewart, University of Durham, Durham, UK

Undergraduate Topics in Computer Science (UTiCS) delivers high-quality instructional content for undergraduates studying in all areas of computing and information science. From core foundational and theoretical material to final-year topics and applications, UTiCS books take a fresh, concise, and modern approach and are ideal for self-study or for a one- or two-semester course. The texts are all authored by established experts in their fields, reviewed by an international advisory board, and contain numerous examples and problems. Many include fully worked solutions.

More information about this series at http://www.springer.com/series/7592

This Springer imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG

The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

This monograph is an overview of practical parallel computing and starts with the basic principles and rules which will enable the reader to design efficient parallel programs for solving various computational problems on the state-of-the-art computing platforms.

The book too was written in parallel. The opening Chap. : Why do we need Parallel Programming has been shaped by all of us during instant communication immediately after the idea of writing such a book had cropped up. In fact, the first chapter was an important motivation for our joint work. We spared no effort in incorporating of our teaching experience into this book.

To enable readers to immediately start gaining practice in parallel computing, Appendix A provides hints for making a personal computer ready to execute parallel programs under Linux, macOS, and MS Windows.

The spectrum of book topics ranges from implementations to efficient applications of parallel processors on different platforms. The book covers shared memory many-core processors, shared memory multi-core processors, and interconnected distributed computers. Chapters of Parts I and II are quite independent and can be read in any order, while chapters of Part III are related to previous chapters and are intended to be a final reading.

The target audience comprises undergraduate and graduate students; engineers, programmers, and industrial experts acting in companies that develop software with an intention to add parallel capabilities for increased performance; research institutions that develop and test computationally intensive software with parallel software codes; and universities and educational institutions that teach courses on parallel computing. The book may also be interesting and useful for the wider public in the part where basic principles and benefits of parallel approaches are presented.

For the readers who wish to be promptly updated with current achievements in the field of parallel computing, we will maintain this information on the book web page. There, also a pool of questions and homeworks will be available and maintained according to experiences and feedbacks from readers.

We are grateful to all our colleagues who have contributed to this book through discussions or by reading and commenting parts of the text, in particular to Matja Depolli for his assistance in testing the exemplar programs, and to Andrej Brodnik for his fruitful suggestions and comments.