Illinois professor co-authors groundbreaking, hands-on approach for teaching parallel programming concepts

In 2007, Wen-mei Hwu, professor of electrical and computer engineering at Illinois, and David Kirk of NVIDIA, teamed up to teach one of the nation’s first university courses on programming massively parallel processors. Graduate students of all disciplines and from around the globe line up to enroll in their summer school intensives. They have teamed up again to produce what is considered the first comprehensive text on the subject.

The new text, Programming Massively Parallel Processors: A Hands-on Approach, teaches students the basic concepts of parallel programming and GPU architecture and prepares them to work in an industry that has moved to multicore processors.

According to Hwu, their book was written to provide students of all disciplines--not just computer science and computer engineering students--the ability to think parallel and to be able to use these techniques in their own work.

Through this text, students learn to effectively program massively parallel processors using real-world case studies and actual software development tools--CUDA (Compute Unified Device Architecture) and OpenCL. Students also develop computational thinking techniques that enable them to think about problems that are amenable to high-performance parallel computing.

“This book is the most comprehensive and authoritative introduction to GPU computing yet,” stated Harvard University professor Hanspeter Pfister. He predicts Programming Massively Parallel Processors: A Hands-on Approach will “be the standard reference for years to come.”

Wen-mei Hwu

Hwu is the Walter J. ("Jerry") Sanders III-Advanced Micro Devices Endowed Chair in Electrical and Computer Engineering in the Coordinated Science Laboratory. He also serves as PI for the world’s first NVIDIA CUDA Center of Excellence at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and co-director of the Intel-Microsoft funded Universal Parallel Computing Research Center (UPCRC Illinois).

 

Kirk, a NVIDIA Fellow and former Chief Scientist, has led the development of graphics technology for today’s most popular consumer entertainment platforms. His contributions to graphic design and graphics technology are numerous--over 50 patents and patent applications and more than 50 publish articles.

About Parallel@Illinois
Parallel@Illinois has been pioneering and promoting parallel computing research and education for over four decades. Current efforts include the Blue Waters petascale supercomputer, a global Cloud Computing Testbed, a CUDA Center of Excellence, a Center for Extreme Scale Computation, the Joint Laboratory for Petascale Computing, an OpenSPARC Center of Excellence, and the Universal Parallel Computing Research Center.
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Contact: Cheri Helregel, Parallel@Illinois, 217/265-6329.

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