Day 104

Day 104: Parallel Architectures

I picked this course by mistake. At the beginning of semester 2 I decided to take every module that was somehow concerned with high performance computing and thus signed up for the two that were on offer: Parallel Programming Languages and Systems (PPLS) and Parallel Architectures (PA). While PPLS was a hit on target for obvious reasons, with PA I failed to realise that this was a hardware course (probably haven't processed what was written on the module description page well enough). I am a software person. By saying this I mean that I have a more or less adequate low to high - level programming experience, familiarity with various software engineering techniques and a bit of working experience as a software developer. However, my general idea of what's happening inside the laptop I'm using used to be not very far from a mythical wonderland where fairies and elves are flying around in a silicon forest and carry data (probably in some sort of boxes or even bags) in and out of the Castle of Princess Ursula where it gets sorted out somehow. Well, I got 2 CPU's actually, so there must be two Ursula's there, dunno how they get along together... A bit exaggerating, but you get the point.

Anyway, while finishing the last assignment for the course I realised that I actually quite liked it. I mean, I managed to get 84% for the first assignment where I had to write about some weird multi-processing architecture designed in 1999 as a pure concept and never implemented since then. I had a very rough idea of what I was writing about (Wikipedia did neither!) - and there you go, 6% or 7% higher than class average! Then I managed to complete the second assignment of implementing a simulator of a multi-cpu cache in just one night (I had a really tough week and simply forgot about the deadline and almost missed it. Ah, shit happens...), give that prior to this assignment I had no idea what cache was all about! And got 65% for it - maybe not that impressive, but given the circumstances... However, the point of this is not how cool I am or something, the point is: I'm glad I made that mistake and took the course. The fairies finally flew away for good. With elves and Ursula's.

Dr. Randal Smith (big name in Sun Microsystems, the inventor of SunSPOTs and probably not only), while giving a presentation at our uni last year said: "... I'm a software person, and all I can say about this piece of technology as a software person is, electrons are involved...". It's still one of my favourite quotes, but I can't refer this to myself anymore. I mean, I know how cache works, yeah!=))