Research Experiences for Undergraduates in Dynamic Distributed Real - Time Systems Program Summer 2000 by Jeff Marquis

(CSE@UTA) was designed to give three sponsored undergraduate students theoretical knowledge, exposure to advanced programming tools, and participation with applied research in parallel and distributed processing. This was achieved through classroom instruction, hands-on application development, introduction to the state-of-the-art PARSA TM Software Development Environment and the ThreadMan TM Thread Manager, and exposure to applied research being conducted to advance the capabilities of PARSA to support distributed cluster computers. We believe the students have benefited from this program by combining the theoretical basis and hands-on exposure to software development issues in parallel and distributed processing. CSE@UTA Professor. In the course the students were introduced to parallel programming concepts and were assigned a series of practical programming assignments using multi-threading for shared memory systems and message passing for distributed memory systems. Specifically, the students were introduced to the pthreads library for exploiting parallel processing on shared memory systems and the Message Passing Interface (MPI) for exploiting parallel processing on distributed memory systems. The students acquired the theoretical knowledge and hands-on parallel programming skills through classroom instruction that allowed them to participate in and materially contribute to the REU 2000 program. Introduction to PARSA: The PARSA TM Software Development Environment and ThreadMan TM Thread Manager are commercial software products developed at CSE@UTA under license to Prism Parallel Technologies, Inc. (www.prismpti.com). The current commercial versions of PARSA and ThreadMan are used for developing parallel multi-threaded software for shared memory systems. CSE@UTA and Prism Parallel Technologies continue to perform collaborative fundamental and applied research to advance the capabilities of PARSA and ThreadMan. The REU 2000 students were given exposure to these ongoing research and development activities, which applied the theoretical knowledge and parallel programming skills obtained through classroom instruction. The REU 2000 students were tasked with replicating applications developed in CSE4351 using PARSA and ThreadMan. At first, students were simply given access to PARSA and the PARSA Programming and Reference Manual and were instructed to figure out the most efficient way to develop applications in PARSA. This part of the program forced the students to independently learn to use state-of-the-art programming tools with a minimum of instruction, which we believe will serve them well throughout their computer science careers. During this phase of the program the students were given cursory guidance by Jeff Marquis, a CSE@UTA Faculty Research Associate and the founder of Prism Parallel Technologies, on the use of PARSA and ThreadMan. The students …