Computação Paralela e Distribuída

Classes → The professor explains the topics clearly, provides a good number of examples, and clearly enjoys teaching the subject. TIP: Taking notes on how computation and communication complexity is calculated across the various examples helps quite a bit (last four classes).

Exam → The average grade was low — around 11 or 12, if I had to guess, possibly lower. You need to know a lot of small details about OpenMP (especially) and MPI, plus all the other course material, which is a lot of content in my opinion. Additionally, not a single exam solution was made available, apart...

The course is not very well organized.

The project was about parallelizing an algorithm, and it had two deliveries. In the first delivery, we had to use OpenMP. We had plenty of time and it wasn't that complicated. For the second delivery we had to use MPI, and not only did we have way less time, teachers also asked us to handle very large inputs. Handling those cases felt like a whole new project.

To test your project, you have to use the RNL cluster, which gets very crowded in the last days before the deadline. The professor's solution to that was basically 'Finish earlier'. -_-

Another...

Project

Historically, this course on parallel algorithms struggles to find good problems to parallelize. A few years back, the project was about parallelizing a Sudoku solver (hint: all the sequential approaches were faster). This year, the only parallelizable part was that the input data was a tree. Other than that, there wasn’t much going on.

Syllabus

The subjects addressed in this course (OpenMP and MPI) are totally outdated. OpenMP has been totally outclassed by things like work-stealing thread pools (see: Rayon or Cilk). MPI is too flexible to really scale well. (For context: our...