The purpose of this course is to introduce the student to the basics of high-performance parallel computing and the national cyber-infrastructure. The course is targeted for both computer science students and students from other disciplines who want to learn how to significantly increase the performance of applications.

Parallel computing is a programming intensive discipline, where nuances of implementation can have significant impact on program performance. This class is a programming intensive class. If you are a weak programmer you may encounter difficulty. It is expected that the student know one or more of C, C++, or Fortran, as well as Unix basics and shell scripting. Further, the student is expected to know basic computer architecture, the role of the CPU, the memory system, and the caches.