[nylug-talk] Parallel programming courses, should interest NYLUG members

[A. Murray Gross]

Folks:

The announcement below was supposed to have been mailed to NYLUG members a 
couple of weeks ago, but an e-mail snafu got in the way . . . . Since 
classes begin tomorrow and registrations will only be accepted till the 
end of next week, it is probably too late for NYLUG'ers to take advantage 
of these courses this semester, but if these are interesting to you and 
you send me an e-mail address, we'll try to get you info on relevant fall 
courses as soon as it is available. If you want to grab one of these 
courses this semester, rather than e-mailing one of the people listed in 
the announcement, call the department office at (718) 951-5657 asap for 
instructions on how to proceed (and then write to one of us for further 
information on the courses :) ).

Best,

Murray Gross
Brooklyn College


This spring, in connection with a proposed certificate program in Parallel
and Distributed Programming, Brooklyn College is offering two courses that
should be of interest to NYLUG members: CIS 744.1, a course on programming
in distributed and parallel environments, and CIS 705, which deals with
the architecture and structure of distributed systems.

Both of these courses are graduate level courses that may be applied, by
those who wish to continue, toward either the MS degree or the
proposed certificate program when it is approved (we hope that the
certificate program will be approved by the Fall of 2008). Classes meet
once weekly on the Brooklyn College campus in Brooklyn (easily accessible
by public transit, approximately 30 minutes from Times Square).

In CIS 744.1, students will write programs using MPI, Mosix, and the basic
threading and process creation primitives available in Linux and Solaris.
Attendees will have access to, and be expected to write code for, a
Linux/Mosix cluster, an MPI cluster, and an 8-processor Sun enterprise
system.  The prerequisites for the course are previous courses in
operating systems and analysis of algorithms, and a working knowledge of 
Unix or Linux.

CIS 705 considers topics in distributed systems:  System Architectures;
scaling; processes, threads and code migration;  clients and servers;
methods of communication, RPC, message and stream oriented communication;
the problem of naming resources in a distributed system--flat naming,
structured naming, and attribute naming; the problems of time and
synchronization, logical clocks, mutual exclusion, and election
algorithms. Prerequisite: CIS 704 or a course in operating systems

The Spring semester begins January 26, and registration will be permitted
as late as the week following the beginning of classes.

For further information, please e-mail Murray Gross
(magross at its.brooklyn.cuny.edu), Prof. Paula Whitlock
(whitlock at its.brooklyn.cuny.edu), or Prof. Dayton Clark
(dayton at brooklyn.cuny.edu).