Peachy Assignments

This page has the resources for Peachy Parallel Assignments, assignments shared so that others can adopt them while teaching topics in parallel and distributed computing. They are a submission category at the EduPar and EduHPC conferences and are peer reviewed to ensure they meet the following criteria:

• Tested: All Peachy Parallel Assignments have been successfully used with real students.
• Adoptable: Peachy Parallel Assignments are easy to adopt. This includes not only the provided materials, but also the content being covered. Ideally, the assignments cover widely-taught concepts using common parallel languages and widely-available hardware, have few prerequisites, and (with variations) are appropriate for different levels of students.
• Cool and inspirational: Peachy Assignments are fun and inspiring for students. They encourage students to spend time with the relevant concepts. Ideal Peachy Assignments are those that students want to demonstrate to their roommate.

Peachy assignments are intended to be the analog of Nifty assignments for parallel and distributed computing.

Try out these assignments using the materials below. Then remember to share your own awesome assignments by submitting them to the next conference with a Peachy contest!

EduHPC 2024

• DNA sequence alignment: An assignment for OpenMP, MPI, and CUDA/OpenCL. Arturo Gonzalez-Escribano, Diego García-Álvarez, and Jesús Cámara. (paper on arxiv)
• An Introduction to Parallel Quantum Computation and Circuit Cutting through QAOA for Max-Cut. Monica VanDieren. (paper on figshare, Materials for assignment (external link))

EduPar 2024

• Paper summarizing all assignments
• "Fixed-Radius Nearest Neighbor Search using RAPIDS AI" by Alina Lazar (Materials for assignment (external link))
• "Visualizing parallelism with a flocking algorithm" by Elizabeth Shoop and Ethan Scheelk (Materials for assignment (external link))

EduHPC 2023

• Paper summarizing all assignments
• "Using MPI For Distributed Hyper-Parameter Optimization And Uncertainty Evaluation" by Erik Pautsch, John Li, Silvio Rizzi, George K. Thiruvathukal, and Maria Pantoja (paper on figshare)
• "1D Heat Equation in Chapel" by Jeremiah Corrado and Daniel Fedorin (paper on figshare)
• "k-Nearest Neighbor with Map Reduce MPI" by Erik Saule (paper on figshare)
• "Parallelizing a 1-Dim Nagel-Schreckenberg Traffic Model" by Ramses van Zon and Marcelo Ponce (paper on arxiv)
• "Program Your Favorite Data Science Pipeline in Spark" by H. Martin Bücker, Marieke Plesske, Johannes Schoder, Wolf Weber (paper on figshare)
• "K-means clustering: An assignment for OpenMP, MPI, and CUDA/OpenCL" by Diego García-Alvarez and Arturo Gonzalez-Escribano (paper on figshare)

EduPar 2023

• Paper summarizing all assignments
• "Introductory Python-based MPI Assignment" by Alina Lazar (link, Materials for assignment (external link))
• "Multi-Paradigm Real-Life Assignment" by Virginia Niculescu (link, Materials for assignment (external link))

EduHPC 2022

• Paper summarizing all assignments
• Simulation and Rendering of Colliding Spheres” by Isabel Rosa, Charlotte Park, Alexandros-Stavros Iliopoulos, Tao B. Schardl, and Charles E. Leiserson (link)
• Hill Climbing with Monte Carlo: An Assignment for OpenMP, MPI, and CUDA/OpenCL, Arturo Gonzalez-Escribano, Yuri Torres, and Rocío Carratalá-Sáez (link)

EduPar 2022

• Paper summarizing all assignments
• Performance and Carbon Footprint of Distributed Workflow Executions by Luyen, Casanova, Ferrera Da Silca (link)
• Warming Stripes: A Cool Start to Big Data Processing by Bücker, Schoder (link)  
• Abelian Sandpile Simulation by Lasserre, Namyst Wacrenier (pdf, zip)

EduHPC 2021

• Paper summarizing all assignments
• Wind Tunnel Simulation by Arturo Gonzalez-Escribano and Yuri Torres (materials for assignment (external link))
• Introduction to Batch Scheduling Concepts and Practices by Herman Li, Rafael Ferreira da Silva, and Henri Casanova ( materials for assignment (external link))

EduHPC 2020

• Paper summarizing all assignments
• Reasoning about multi-core application performance by Henri Casanova, Rafael Ferreira da Silva, and William Koch ( materials for assignment (external link))
• Simulation of life evolution by Arturo Gonzalez-Escribano and Yuri Torres (materials for assignment (external link))

EduHPC 2019

• Paper summarizing all assignments
• Agent-based simulation of fire extinguishing by Arturo Gonzalez-Escribano and Jorge Fernandez-Fabeiro (materials for assignment)
• Thread-to-core optimization by Muhammad Alfian Amrizal, Agung, Ryusuke Egawa, and Hiroyuki Takizawa (materials for assignment (external link; log in using username 'sc19' and password 'EduHPC-19'))
• Parallel computing in the cloud for all levels by Steven Bogaerts (materials for assignment)
• Applications of parallel prefix sum by Sukhamay Kundu
• Pin Finder by Daniel A. Ellsworth and Allen Malony (materials for assignment)
• Dask processing and analytics for large data sets by Alina Lazar

EduPar 2019

• Paper summarizing all assignments
• Face recognition by Ozcan Ozturk (materials for assignment (external link))
• Finding the electric potential of a square wire by Ben Glick and Jens Mache (materials for assignment (external link; log in using username `edupar19` and password `reviewMe!`))
• Graphical heat diffusion by David P. Bunde (materials for assignment, including previous writeup (external link))

EduHPC 2018

• Paper summarizing all assignments
• Computing a Movie of Zooming into a Fractal by Martin Burtscher (writeup, materials for assignment (zip))
• Optimization of an Image Processing Algorithm: Histogram Equalization by Julian Gutierrez, David Kaeli, Fritz Previlon (writeup, materials for assignment (zip))
• OpenMP: What’s Inside the Black Box? by Eduard Ayguade, Fabio Francisco, Lluc Alvarez (writeup, materials for assignment (zip))
• The Wave Equation as a Motivating Example for High Performance Computing by David Joiner (materials for assignment (zip))
• Storms of High-Energy Particles: An assignment for OpenMP, MPI, and CUDA/OpenCL by Arturo Gonzalez-Escribano, Eduardo Rodriguez-Gutiez (materials for assignment (external link))

EduPar 2018

• Using the Monte Carlo Pattern to Simulate a Forest Fire by Joel C. Adams (writeup, materials for assignment)
• Fire Simulator and Fractals: using a visualization library to introduce CUDA by Tia Newhall and Andrew Danner (writeup, materials for assignment (external link))
• Peachy Unplugged Parallels by David W. Brown (writeup)
• Reproducibility in Parallel Computing using Floating-Point Arithmetic by Ganesh Gopalakrishnan (writeup)
• Data Races are Pure Evil: A Simple Java-based Illustration by Ganesh Gopalakrishnan (writeup)
• Parallel Programming Performance Hinges on Memory Access Efficiency by Ganesh Gopalakrishnan (writeup)