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lkung

It's important to understand the hardware implementation of the machine you are programming on in order to understand the most efficient way to implement your program. Referring back to the demos in class, it makes a huge difference whether the processor:

  • shouts the answer
  • passes the answer on a sheet of paper
  • mails the answer
  • gets jiggy with the answer

The machine characteristics should influence the implementation of your parallel program.

This brings up the question of - how portable are parallel programs?

pebbled

Speaking of portability- one way to parallelize, as discussed in class, is through SIMD (discussed later), implementation of which relies upon the processor's instruction set. Note the disparity in support for one such group of instructions between manufacturers, Intel and AMD, and Operating systems: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advanced_Vector_Extensions#Operating_system_support