CSCI 3366 (Introduction to Parallel and Distributed Processing), Spring 2001:
Review for Exam 2

Format of the exam

The exam will be in class April 26. You will have 75 minutes. You may use your textbook and any notes or papers you care to bring, but you may not use other books, a calculator or computer, or each other's papers.

The following are some kinds of questions that might be on the exam. It is not necessarily an exhaustive list of all types of questions on the exam, but should give you an idea of what to expect.

• Multiple-choice and/or short-answer questions.

• Questions in which you are given a pseudocode algorithm or some code (using MPI functions and/or POSIX threads functions) and asked what it does, whether it works, how to fix it, etc.

• Questions in which you are asked to write a pseudocode algorithm or some code (using MPI or POSIX threads) to accomplish a given task. You may be given some of the code and asked to ``fill in the blanks'', or you may be given descriptions of functions to use in your solution.

Material to review

The emphasis in this exam will be on material covered since Exam 1, although some questions may draw on material covered earlier in the course (e.g., basic knowledge of MPI functions).

Reading

You are responsible for material in the assigned reading (chapters 5 through 8 of the textbook). The exam will likely emphasize material covered in class, however, so you need not review carefully examples or topics not covered in class.

Topics

You are also responsible for all material covered in class. Below is a brief list of topics we have covered since the preceding exam.

• Pipelined computations.

• Synchronous computations.

• Load balancing and termination detection.

• Shared-memory programming.