Advise Me HN: Parallel Computing n00b

4 pointsgeekytenny2 comments

Hi, I have recently picked interest in parallel computing. I watched some clips on CUDA now i've just seen an introductory tutorial on some chip which was in the playstation. I'm prepared to get an SDK and don't want to be locked into some technology that wont fly, or begin learning something that is a 'no no'. Help with pointers.

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Get the Pthreads O'Reilly book. It's the best introduction to various ideas and primitives that you will need to think about parallel programs.

Also I would recommend OpenCL over CUDA if you're worried about being locked-in. It's got some of the lowest-common-denominator funk to it, but it's a lot more portable.

dont forget parallel is much larger than cuda, gpu's just happen to be largely parallelizable chips. If your really basic, play around with java and get a feeling for threads and synchronous, maybe write a map/reduce program or 2 and run it on aws.

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