Parallel Computing

0:11 - We’ve mainly talked about hardware in the first two weeks. Now we’re going to focus on software. We’ll take a couple of simple examples and consider how you could split up each calculation to take advantage of a shared or distributed memory parallel computer. We’ll cover some of the key issues of parallel computing this week at a conceptual level. Again, the analogy of different people working on whiteboards is very useful to illustrate the core concepts. One of the examples we’ll use which is a very simple way of simulating the way the traffic flows on a road is something I hope you’ll find interesting to illustrate how we can use computer simulation to make predictions about the real world.

0:48 - Now the way the traffic simulation is parallelised will allow us to look at what overheads are introduced by parallelisation and enable us to start to quantify when running on a parallel computer is worthwhile and when it isn’t.