Parallel Processing Computers Books

The Art of Multiprocessor Programming

Maurice Herlihy, Nir Shavit

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 5 Average rating: 5.0 of 5

Editorial Review:

This book is the first comprehensive presentation of the principles and tools available for programming multiprocessor machines. It is of immediate use to programmers working with the new architectures. For example, the next generation of computer game consoles will all be multiprocessor-based, and the game industry is currently struggling to understand how to address the programming challenges presented by these machines.
This change in the industry is so fundamental that it is certain to require a significant response by universities, and courses on multicore programming will become a staple of computer science curriculums.
The authors are well known and respected in this community and both teach and conduct research in this area. Prof. Maurice Herlihy is on the faculty of Brown University. He is the recipient of the 2003 Dijkstra Prize in distributed computing. Prof. Nir Shavit is on the faculty of Tel-Aviv University and a member of the technical staff at Sun Microsystems Laboratories. In 2004 they shared the Gödel Prize, the highest award in theoretical computer science.

* THE book on multicore programming, the new paradigm of computer science
* Written by the world's most revered experts in multiprocessor programming and performance
* Includes examples, models, exercises, PowerPoint slides, and sample Java programs

Programming Erlang: Software for a Concurrent World

Joe Armstrong

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Total reviews: 24 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

Editorial Review:

Erlang solves one of the most pressing problems facing developers today: how to write reliable, concurrent, high-performance systems. It's used worldwide by companies who need to produce reliable, efficient, and scalable applications. Invest in learning Erlang now.

Moore's Law is the observation that the amount you can do on a single chip doubles every two years. But Moore's Law is taking a detour. Rather than producing faster and faster processors, companies such as Intel and AMD are producing multi-core devices: single chips containing two, four, or more processors. If your programs aren't concurrent, they'll only run on a single processor at a time. Your users will think that your code is slow.

Erlang is a programming language designed for building highly parallel, distributed, fault-tolerant systems. It has been used commercially for many years to build massive fault-tolerated systems that run for years with minimal failures.

Erlang programs run seamlessly on multi-core computers: this means your Erlang program should run a lot faster on a 4 core processor than on a single core processor, all without you having to change a line of code.

Erlang combines ideas from the world of functional programming with techniques for building fault-tolerant systems to make a powerful language for building the massively parallel, networked applications of the future.

This book presents Erlang and functional programming in the familiar Pragmatic style. And it's written by Joe Armstrong, one of the creators of Erlang.

It includes example code you'll be able to build upon. In addition, the book contains the full source code for two interesting applications:

A SHOUTcast server which you can use to stream music to every computer in your house, and

a full-text indexing and search engine that can index gigabytes of data.

Learn how to write programs that run on dozens or even hundreds of local and remote processors. See how to write robust applications that run even in the face of network and hardware failure, using the Erlang programming language.

Intel Threading Building Blocks: Outfitting C++ for Multi-core Processor Parallelism

James Reinders

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 3 Average rating: 3.5 of 5

Editorial Review:

Multi-core chips from Intel and AMD offer a dramatic boost in speed and responsiveness, and plenty of opportunities for multiprocessing on ordinary desktop computers. But they also present a challenge: More than ever, multithreading is a requirement for good performance. This guide explains how to maximize the benefits of these processors through a portable C++ library that works on Windows, Linux, Macintosh, and Unix systems. With it, you'll learn how to use Intel Threading Building Blocks (TBB) effectively for parallel programming -- without having to be a threading expert. Written by James Reinders, Chief Evangelist of Intel Software Products, and based on the experience of Intel's developers and customers, this book explains the key tasks in multithreading and how to accomplish them with TBB in a portable and robust manner. With plenty of examples and full reference material, the book lays out common patterns of uses, reveals the gotchas in TBB, and gives important guidelines for choosing among alternatives in order to get the best performance. You'll learn how Intel Threading Building Blocks: Enables you to specify tasks instead of threads for better portability, easier programming, more understandable source code, and better performance and scalability in general Focuses on the goal of parallelizing computationally intensive work to deliver high-level solutions Is compatible with other threading packages, and doesn't force you to pick one package for your entire program Emphasizes scalable, data-parallel programming, which allows program performance to increase as you add processors Relies on generic programming, which enables you to write the best possible algorithms with thefewest constraints Any C++ programmer who wants to write an application to run on a multi-core system will benefit from this book. TBB is also very approachable for a C programmer or a C++ programmer without much experience with templates. Best of all, you don't need experience with parallel programming or multi-core processors to use this book.

Introduction to Parallel Computing (2nd Edition)

Ananth Grama, George Karypis, Vipin Kumar, Anshul Gupta

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 6 Average rating: 3.0 of 5

Worst text book ever written.. 1 out of 5 stars.
16 of 17 people found this review helpful.

This book is extremely poorly written. The authors glaze over complex equations and magically come up with answers that don't make any sense. For example, to anyone having taken a prior architecture course the author's are completely wrong in the majority of cache performance analysis done early on in the book. Problems associated with that topic force the reader to dumb-down quite a bit to achieve their "expected" answer.

The user is left in most cases to derive the bizarre math that is involved through the authors' hand-waiving.
One of my personal favorites is from a formula derivation given on page 340, the sequence follows from the text as:

n^2=Ktwnp,
n=Ktwp,
n^2=K^2tw^2p^2, <--what, did I miss something here?
W=K^2tw^2p^2,

On top of that there are numerous typos in the sparse visual examples that do exist. Thus it makes it even more confounding to read through.

If you are evaluating the text for a possible parallel computing course. Don't waste your time or money with this text, your students will thank you. If you are student looking to take a class that uses this text...dropping a brick on your foot might be more enjoyable. If you think I'm a disgruntled student trying to seek revenge, I'm not. I did fine in the course, and I just want to make sure that no one else gets blind-sided by the non-sensical garbage that is this text. If there was a negative rating...this would be below 1 star.

Editorial Review:

This book provides a basic, in-depth look at techniques for the design and analysis of parallel algorithms and for programming them on commercially available parallel platforms. Principles of parallel algorithms design and different parallel programming models are both discussed, with extensive coverage of MPI, POSIX threads, and Open MP. This second edition includes two new chapters on the principles of parallel programming and programming paradigms, as well as new information on portability. For programmers wanting to gain proficiency in all aspects of parallel programming.

Parallel Programming With MPI

Peter Pacheco

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 12 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

Very insightful! 5 out of 5 stars.
21 of 21 people found this review helpful.

This book is a great introduction not only to MPI but to parallel programming itself. Initially, one learns essential concepts of parallel programming, including hardware and network topologies. An MPI version of ``Hello World!'' gently introduces the reader to the mechanics of running MPI programs (if you haven't set up your parallel computing environment yet, this may well be the most time consuming chapter of the book!) In what follows, the author lays out the basics of each topic in parallel programming, followed by MPI-specific details (i.e. which MPI function is used in that situation). Particularly worthy of praise is the example-driven approach, whereby in each chapter a problem is presented (like numerical integration or matrix multiplication), and the author shows how to solve them with techniques taught in that chapter. Some problems are rehashed in other sections/chapters, in order to show different PP techniques to solve them. The book doesn't suffer from the black-box syndrome of hiding implementation details: the reader is usually shown the inner workings of, say, each communication technique, while being advised to use MPI's built-in functions instead of rolling out his own versions.

Topics covered include collective communication methods, I/O, debugging, design, performance, parallel algorithms and libraries, and advanced topics in communication. A handy appendix on MPI functions wraps up the book.

As an aside, I will be forever grateful to this book due to its clear exposition of the butterfly broadcast method, which helped me understand the Cooley-Tukey iterative version of the FFT (which uses the same butterfly idea), something I had been struggling with for a couple of years. I would have gladly bought the book for this explanation alone.

Editorial Review:

A hands-on introduction to parallel programming based on the Message-Passing Interface (MPI) standard, the de-facto industry standard adopted by major vendors of commercial parallel systems. This textbook/tutorial, based on the C language, contains many fully-developed examples and exercises. The complete source code for the examples is available in both C and Fortran 77. Students and professionals will find that the portability of MPI, combined with a thorough grounding in parallel programming principles, will allow them to program any parallel system, from a network of workstations to a parallel supercomputer.

* Proceeds from basic blocking sends and receives to the most esoteric aspects of MPI.
* Includes extensive coverage of performance and debugging.
* Discusses a variety of approaches to the problem of basic I/O on parallel machines.
* Provides exercises and programming assignments.

Turtles, Termites, and Traffic Jams: Explorations in Massively Parallel Microworlds (Complex Adaptive Systems)

Mitchel Resnick

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 16 Average rating: 4.0 of 5

interesting, but describes an old version of the software 3 out of 5 stars.
9 of 10 people found this review helpful.

This is a book describing the research of a team at MIT using a version of the educational language "Logo". Running in a simple graphical environment which supports multiple parallel operation of code in the same shared space. Write a few lines of code for an "ant", then let 1000 of them loose. The current version of this "StarLogo" system is written in Java, and available as a free download for anyone to play with.

The use of Logo is both a strength and a weakness of the approach. The strength is that the code is concise and easy to understand. The weakness is that there is only one source of the software, and anyone wishing to try it is limited to the available download. This would not be such a limitation if the book described the same version, but unfortunately things have moved on a lot since the book was written, and few (if any) of the examples will work without alteration.

As well as the development of the StarLogo system, the book covers experiments in emergent behaviour. Typical sections include how parameter and environment changes can affect the growth and development of simulated ant colonies, and a theoretical basis for those "phantom traffic jams" we have all experienced.

This book is certainly interesting if you are interested in developing parallel software simulations, or if you are interested in marginal computer languages, but don't expect the code to work without effort.

Editorial Review:

How does a bird flock keep its movements so graceful and synchronized? Most people assume that the bird in front leads and the others follow. In fact, bird flocks don't have leaders: they are organized without an organizer, coordinated without a coordinator. And a surprising number of other systems, from termite colonies to traffic jams to economic systems, work the same decentralized way. Turtles, Termites, and Traffic Jams describes innovative new computational tools that can qhelp people (even young children) explore the workings of such systems--and help them move beyond the centralized mindset.

Parallel Programming: Techniques and Applications Using Networked Workstations and Parallel Computers (2nd Edition)

Barry Wilkinson, Michael Allen

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 6 Average rating: 3.5 of 5

Clear and informative book, but... 4 out of 5 stars.
3 of 3 people found this review helpful.

The book does quite well in explaining the concepts of parallel computing and programming, and I have very few complaints about anything actually written in the book. (A companion CD with some sample MPI/PVM programs would have been nice.) However, as well as this book is written and organized, it is almost comical to have this size of book (paperback, at that) costing nearly $... If the book would have cost about $.. less and had the companion CD, it would have been five stars.

Editorial Review:

This accessible text covers the techniques of parallel programming in a practical manner that enables readers to write and evaluate their parallel programs. Supported by the National Science Foundation and exhaustively class-tested, it is the first text of its kind that does not require access to a special multiprocessor system, concentrating instead on parallel programs that can be executed on networked computers using freely available parallel software tools. The book covers the timely topic of cluster programming, interesting to many programmers due to the recent availability of low-cost computers. Uses MPI pseudocodes to describe algorithms and allows different programming tools to be implemented, and provides readers with thorough coverage of shared memory programming, including Pthreads and OpenMP. Useful as a professional reference for programmers and system administrators.

Pattern-Oriented Software Architecture Volume 2: Patterns for Concurrent and Networked Objects

Douglas Schmidt, Michael Stal, Hans Rohnert, Frank Buschmann

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Total reviews: 22 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

Editorial Review:

Designing application and middleware software to run in concurrent and networked environments is a significant challenge to software developers. The patterns catalogued in this second volume of Pattern-Oriented Software Architectures (POSA) form the basis of a pattern language that addresses issues associated with concurrency and networking.

The book presents 17 interrelated patterns ranging from idioms through architectural designs. They cover core elements of building concurrent and network systems: service access and configuration, event handling, synchronization,

and concurrency. All patterns present extensive examples and known uses in multiple programming languages, including C++, C, and Java.

The book can be used to tackle specific software development problems or read from cover to cover to provide a fundamental understanding of the best practices for constructing concurrent and networked applications and middleware.

About the Authors

This book has been written by the award winning team responsible for the first POSA volume "A System of Patterns", joined in this volume by Douglas C. Schmidt from University of California, Irvine (UCI), USA.

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Using OpenMP: Portable Shared Memory Parallel Programming (Scientific and Engineering Computation)

Barbara Chapman, Gabriele Jost, Ruud van der Pas

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Total reviews: 1 Average rating: 4.0 of 5

Editorial Review:

"I hope that readers will learn to use the full expressibility and power of OpenMP. This book should provide an excellent introduction to beginners, and the performance section should help those with some experience who want to push OpenMP to its limits."
--from the foreword by David J. Kuck, Intel Fellow, Software and Solutions Group, and Director, Parallel and Distributed Solutions, Intel Corporation

OpenMP, a portable programming interface for shared memory parallel computers, was adopted as an informal standard in 1997 by computer scientists who wanted a unified model on which to base programs for shared memory systems. OpenMP is now used by many software developers; it offers significant advantages over both hand-threading and MPI. Using OpenMP offers a comprehensive introduction to parallel programming concepts and a detailed overview of OpenMP.

Using OpenMP discusses hardware developments, describes where OpenMP is applicable, and compares OpenMP to other programming interfaces for shared and distributed memory parallel architectures. It introduces the individual features of OpenMP, provides many source code examples that demonstrate the use and functionality of the language constructs, and offers tips on writing an efficient OpenMP program. It describes how to use OpenMP in full-scale applications to achieve high performance on large-scale architectures, discussing several case studies in detail, and offers in-depth troubleshooting advice. It explains how OpenMP is translated into explicitly multithreaded code, providing a valuable behind-the-scenes account of OpenMP program performance. Finally, Using OpenMP considers trends likely to influence OpenMP development, offering a glimpse of the possibilities of a future OpenMP 3.0 from the vantage point of the current OpenMP 2.5.

With multicore computer use increasing, the need for a comprehensive introduction and overview of the standard interface is clear. Using OpenMP provides an essential reference not only for students at both undergraduate and graduate levels but also for professionals who intend to parallelize existing codes or develop new parallel programs for shared memory computer architectures.

Principles of Parallel Programming

Calvin Lin, Larry Snyder

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