Preworkshop Reading Materials

All participants at the MSRI Parallel Computation Workshop will be assumed to have a basic background in parallel computation already -- there will be no basic background tutorials or lectures. Fortunately, anybody can get such a background in a day by reading the documents listed below under required reading.

Required Reading List

At a minimum, make sure you read the following before the workshop, in order:

1. Introduction to Parallel Computing

2. POSIX Threads Programming

3. MPI Tutorial

Other Relevant Documents

Skim or read as time permits:

1. Miscellaneous Papers and Files

2. OpenMP tutorial and GOMP

3. Applied Parallel Computing Lectures

4. Alternatives to threads

5. Erlang programming language

6. E programming language

7. About Twisted's Deferred Objects

SAGE-Related Reading List

Because of something called the Global Interpreter Lock (or GIL) in the Python interpreter, threading is pretty useless for speeding up serious mathematical compute applications. For *multi-threaded* programs to be truly useful for SAGE computation, they will have to be implemented entirely in C/C++/Fortran libraries and SageX extension modules in blocks of code that do not make any Python/C API calls.

1. Python threading tutorial

2. Discussion About the GIL in Python

3. List post about OpenMp and Python

4. Python Parallel Recipes

5. POSH -- Python object sharing; a way to get around using threads for what we need

6. Parallel Python -- is this useful for something? (or is it only stupid closed-source poppycock?) -- it's another way to get around threads