HW5: Parallel Programming In Practice

CS 641 Homework, Dr. Lawlor

Here's a sequential heat flow simulator, also on the powerwall in ~olawlor/641_demo/hw5.

In this simulator, we impose heat flow on the external boundaries, and watch it diffuse into the interior.

This program outputs a PPM image to a file named "out.ppm".   On NetRun, this image should show up in the browser automatically.  On a UNIX or MacOS machine, you can view the resulting fractal image via SSH X forwarding with:
    xv out.ppm
Otherwise, you can copy the files off the powerwall for local display; you may prefer to
    convert out.ppm out.jpg
to get a normal JPEG before copying.

Here's what the image looks like after 1000 steps, for a 800x400 simulation, which takes about 5 seconds on the powerwall:


I'd like you to:
  1. Write an OpenMP version of the simulator, and benchmark it on up to two processors of the powerwall.  (Compile with "g++ main.cpp -o main -O5 -ffast-math -fopenmp ".  Time with "time ./main".)  Measure your speedup with and without OpenMP--it should be possible to get decent speedup!
  2. Write an MPI version of the simulator, and benchmark it on up to ten processors.  Again, measure speedup.
Both versions should still create a single correct "out.ppm" file.

Please turn in:
You can email the source code and README.txt to me directly, or just leave them on the powerwall in your "~/hw5" directory.  This homework is due at midnight Tuesday, March 31.