Parallel Functional Programming (7.5 hec), Spring 2015, DAT280, DIT261

News

Staff / contact information and office hours

Registration

The course is open to both GU and Chalmers students. Chalmers students should register in advance (as usual). Unlike last year, GU students have to register online in LPW at the Student portal. Registration is obligatory. Please register yourself on the course at the latest 23rd March (the date of the first lecture). Otherwise, you may lose your place. If you have problems, please contact the CSE student office. Further information about registration and how to activate your student account

Overview

Literature

This course does not have a set book. Instead, you will be expected to read a number of research papers. Links to those papers will be made available through the Lectures page. However, note that Simon Marlow's book on Parallel and Concurrent Programming in Haskell covers a good chunk of the course (and lots of other interesting stuff). Simon will kindly give a guest lecture about his work (using Haskell to tame parallelism at Facebook) later in the course.

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

Learning outcomes:

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 and improvement, each course has student representatives. Their role includes giving the teachers feedback on the course. The procedure for course evaluation changed considerably recently, see the set of slides linked below. This is the fourth instance of a course that will always be evolving. It is also deliberately close to the state of the art in research, which makes it different from many courses. Please talk to us, the teachers, about how you experience the course, or, even better, volunteer to be a student representative. We promise to take seriously your ideas, suggestions and constructive criticism.

Chalmers central instructions on course evaluation