CSci 4409. Programming for Parallel Architecture: Resources

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In-class examples

• First Clojure example
• Sequences, clojure documentation, intro to laziness.
• Using Java in Clojure. Lab 3: based on the example create your own recursive picture and draw it using Java methods. Play with different shapes. Randomness can be fun, too. An interactive component will get extra credit.
• Unit testing in Clojure.
• First Erlang example: pattern-matching and functions.

Articles and other reading resources

Required reading is marked in light green.

• Aug. 26: The free lunch is over: a fundamental turn toward concurrency in software by Herb Sutter (appeared in Dr. Dobb's Journal, March 2005).
• Aug. 26: It's time to get good at functional programming By Michael Swaine, December 03, 2008, Dr.Dobbs.
• Aug. 26: Wikipedia article on parallel computing introduces and clarifies some important terminology.
• Amdahl's law (wikipedia)
• Aug. 31: Why Should You Care About MapReduce? by Eugene Ciurana. A nice language-agnostic overview of the Map-Reduce approach (and its Java implementation).
• Sept 21: Overview of clojure concurrency (includes explanations of ref, var, agent, and atom)
• Sept 21: Rich Hickey's talk on clojure concurrency, slides for this talk, the ant colony simulation example from the talk (includes refs and agents exampels)

Programming resources and software downloads

• Counterclockwise: Clojure plugin for Eclipse

Clojure resources

• Clojure main web site
• Clojure APIs
• Clojure testing framework

Hadoop resources

• Description of Hadoop
• Oct 14: MapReduce and HDFS lecture by Aaron Kimball, the first engineer at Cloudera
• Oct 21: Programming with Hadoop by Aaron Kimball (key Hadoop terminology and approaches) Terminology you need to know: job, task, JobTracker, TaskTracker, NameNode, mapper, reducer, InputSplit, RecordReader, RecordWriter, Partitioner. You also need to know main Java interfaces used by Hadoop. Also, you need to know what Hadoop streaming refers to.
• A wikipedia article on Hadoop: quite detailed and helpful.
• clojure-hadoop package with downloadable examples (the classical Hadoop wordcount example done in Clojure).
• Hadoop + Clojure lecture by Stuart Sierra (work done with Tim Dysinger)
• November 9: Hadoop Training: MapReduce Algorithms by Aaron Kimball.
• Apache Hadoop tutorial (Java), including two versions of the wordcount example.

Erlang resources

• erlang.org (links to resources and papers)
• Erlang course (concise and helpful)
• Working with Erlang shell (note that we are not using the toolbar)
• Lists module (available list processing functions).
• Erlang syntax
• Andre Pang's talk "Concurrency and Erlang" at linux.conf.au in 2007:video, slides
• Concurrency course