Teaching Assistant: Iman Sadooghi

Office Hours Time: Monday/Wednesday 12:45PM-1:45PM

Office Hours Location: SB003b

For those of you working towards the Master Of Computer Science With a Specialization in Distributed and Cloud Computing , we know how important CS553 is for your coursework towards satisfying the necesary requiremetns towards your degree. Since we are not teaching CS553 in the Spring 2014 (as expected), we have added CS451 to the list of potential courses satisfying the needed requirements of the specialization. Please contact Ioan Raicu at iraicu@cs.iit.edu if you have any questions about this.

This course covers general introductory concepts in the design and implementation of parallel and distributed systems, covering all the major branches such as Cloud Computing, Grid Computing, Cluster Computing, Supercomputing, and Many-core Computing. The specific topics that this course will cover are:  asynchronous/synchronous computation/communication, concurrency control, fault tolerance, GPU architecture and programming, heterogeneity, interconnection topologies, load balancing, memory consistency model, memory hierarchies, Message passing interface (MPI), MIMD/SIMD, multithreaded programming, parallel algorithms & architectures, parallel I/O, performance analysis and tuning, power, programming models (data parallel, task parallel, process-centric, shared/distributed memory), scalability and performance studies, scheduling, storage systems, and synchronization. Some of these topics are covered in more depth in the graduate courses focusing on specific sub-domains of distributed systems, such CS546, CS550, CS553, CS554, CS570, and CS595. While this CS451 course is not a pre-requisite to any of the graduate level courses in distributed systems, both undergraduate and graduate students who wish to be better prepared for these courses could take this CS451 course. This course involves lectures, programming assignments, and exams. This course was offered as CS495 in the past. Prerequsites: CS351 or CS450. 

You can find the detailed syllabus here. More details will be posted here soon.

We have setup a mailing list at https://piazza.com/iit/spring2014/cs451/home. Please post any questions you may have there.