CSE 590 ZPL (CSE 590 ZP)

High Performance Scientific Computing in ZPL

Larry Snyder and the ZPL Team
Winter Quarter 1999
Wednesday, 2:30-3:30 PM
Loew 222

Welcome to the CSE 590 ZPL Home Page!

Description

The class will introduce the ZPL array language (developed at UW and released in July 1997), with the goal of teaching how to write high quality scientific programs that are portable, fast, and easy to change. Context, including parallel architecture trends, programming language issues, accomodating legacy programs, etc. will be presented.

Students should be prepared to program an application or other basic computation from their scientific discipline in ZPL. The last few weeks of class will be devoted to student presentations of their solutions. Previous experience indicates that some students will produce a operational scientific program for their research.

ZPL is a parallel array language that has shown performance approximating C with message passing. ZPL programs are portable across all parallel and sequential platforms, including: Cray T3D, T3E, Intel Paragon, IBM SP-2, SGI PowerChallenge, Origin, worstation clusters, etc. Guidance in accessing off-campus supercomputers is available.

Mailing Lists

Please send mail to majordomo@cs with "subscribe cse590zpl" in the body of the message to subscribe to the class mailing list.

Participants may also be interested in joining the zpl-announce and zpl-users mailing lists. zpl-announce is used by the ZPL team to distribute information to users (e.g., information about new releases). zpl-users is an e-mail forum for users of the ZPL system. Both lists have minimal traffic. To be added to the either list, send mail to majordomo@cs with "subscribe zpl-announce" and/or "subscribe zpl-users" in the body of the message.

Text Book

None. The class will rely on materials on the web. Documents and research papers can be found on in the ZPL web pages. Specifically, we will closely follow the ZPL Programming Guide (published by MIT Press, also available on the web for free).

Prerequisites

Familiarity with some scientific computation e.g. Fortran, C, or MATLAB programming, on a UNIX platform will be assumed.

The class is variable (1-3) credit, CR/NC or audit. Students will write, debug, and run a ZPL program selected from their technical discipline. Suitable computations range from whole applications to kernels (inner loops) of a scientific computation.

Other Useful Information


zpl-info@cs.washington.edu
Last modified: 12 January 1999