Parallel Functional Programming (7.5 hec), Spring 2012, DAT280, DIT261

News

• 2012-08-22: The retake exam (omtenta) will be on 27 August in the afternoon (14.00-18.00) in the V building (Väg och Vatten). It is not (after all) possible to register for the exam, and you should just turn up if you wish to take it. Good luck! If you have not finished your labs, now is the time to get them done too. (You must pass both the labs and the exam to get any points on the course.)
• 2012-05-21: Tomorrow morning's exam will be in Hörsalslängan. The most likely room is HA1, but the final location will be determined in the morning and posted on a noticeboard. Please pass this information to other students.
• 2012-05-10: I gather that it has not been possible to register for the written exam on the student portal. I have asked about this and am told that you should just turn up to the exam, without registering in advance. There will be room for everyone. The written exam is on tuesday May 22 in the morning session (8.30).
• 2012-05-10: Please note that there will be only one presentation this morning (due to illness). So we will start at 11.00 in EC.
• 2012-03-21: Today, at 10.00 in EC, we will discuss the entries for the Sort Challenge, and award the prize.
• 2012-03-20: Someone pointed out that the link to the Fire system on the Assignments page was broken last night. We extended the deadline to the Sort Competition to midnight tonight in case there is anyone who tried but failed to submit last night. Please feel free to submit now.
• 2012-03-20: Bring your laptop to Simon Marlow's lecture tomorrow as Simon will want you to do exercises (and the machines in E-studion are not suitable...)
• 2012-03-20: Please note that tomorrow's (wednesday's) lecture at 15.15 is in E-Studion again. (Sorry for being confused about times yesterday.) You enter that from outside the building, just opposite HC1 - HC4 on Hörsalsvägen.
• 2012-03-16: Information about Tools is available (on the Assignments page). You should be getting started on Exercise 1. Note that the lectures in Week 2 are on Monday and Wednesday. On Thursday morning, we will meet to discuss the winning code for the Sorting competition, see the schedule. (This is the official schedule. Ignore the TimeEdit one.)

Staff / contact information

• John Hughes, Lecturer and Examiner, rjmh@chalmers dot se
• Mary Sheeran, Lecturer and Examiner, ms@chalmers dot se
• Nick Frolov, Teaching Assistant, frolov@chalmers dot se
• Homepage: http://www.cse.chalmers.se/edu/course/pfp/

Registration

If you have not yet registered for the course, just turn up at the first lecture. We will gather names and make sure that everyone gets registered. The course is open to both GU and Chalmers students.

Overview

• PFP is an elective, advanced MSc and doctoral level university course. It is run by the FP group at the CSE department (Chalmers and GU).
• a written exam (you may bring a "summary sheet").
• Course "size": 7.5hec = 1/8 study year ~= 200h = 25h / week => time to get started;-)
• Grading: The final grade of the course is based on your exam grade. You must, however, also pass the lab assignments.

Aim

The aim of the course is to introduce the principles and practice of parallel programming in a functional programming language. By parallel programming, we mean programming using multiple hardware cores or processors in order to gain speed. The course covers approaches to parallel functional programming in both Haskell and Erlang. It covers current research on these topics, and relies heavily on scientific papers as its source materials.

Syllabus

• The course covers the principles and practice of parallel programming in both Haskell and Erlang.
• Advantages of functional approaches to parallelism: immutability, absence of data races, determinism.
• Profiling parallel functional programs: granularity, bottlenecks, locality, data-dependencies.
• Parallel functional algorithms: divide-and-conquer.
• Approaches to expressing parallelism in Haskell: the Eval monad, the Par monad, parallel strategies, skeletons, data parallelism.
• Functional approaches to GPU programming
• Parallelisation and distribution for Erlang. Scalability. Handling errors in a massively parallel system.
• Case studies of industrial parallel functional programming, such as map-reduce and scalable no-SQL databases.
• Guest lectures by leading researchers and practitioners.

Learning outcomes:

• Knowledge and understanding
  • Distinguish between concurrency and parallelism.
  • Give an overview of approaches to parallelism in functional programming languages in the scientific literature.
• Skills and abilities
  • Write, modify and test parallel functional programs, to run on a variety of architectures such as shared memory multiprocessors, networks of commodity servers, and GPUs.
  • Interpret parallelism profiles and address bottlenecks.
• Judgement and approach
  • Identify when using a functional language may be appropriate for solving a parallel programming problem.
  • Select an appropriate form of parallel functional programming for a given problem, and expain the choice.

Context

The prerequisite for the course is to have successfully completed two years within the subject Computer Science or equivalent. Course participants must also have completed an introductory course in Functional programming, preferably using Haskell or Erlang. (Examples at Chalmers are TDA452 and TDA555).

Course Evaluation

For the purpose of course evaluation each course has student representatives. Their role includes giving the teachers feedback on the course.

Chalmers central instructions on course evaluation