Parallel Program Development

Chapter 6

Parallel Program Development

In the last three chapters we haven’t just learned about parallel APIs, we’ve also developed a number of small parallel programs, and each of these programs has involved the implementation of a parallel algorithm. In this chapter, we’ll look at a couple of larger examples: solving n-body problems and solving the traveling sales-person problem. For each problem, we’ll start by looking at a serial solution and examining modifications to the serial solution. As we apply Foster’s methodology, we’ll see that there are some striking similarities between developing shared- and distributed-memory programs. We’ll also see that in parallel programming there are problems that we need to solve for which there is no serial analog. We’ll see that there are instances in which, as parallel programmers, we’ll have to start “from scratch.”