15-418/15-618: Parallel Computer Architecture and Programming, Fall 2025: Schedule

Notes

  • The exact topics of the lectures are subject to change.
  • We do not anticipate changing any of the other dates (exams, assignments, etc.)
  • To watch the lecture videos, sign in to YouTube using your andrew.cmu.edu account.
Date Topic Assignment  

Aug 25 Why parallelism? (slides; video )
Aug 27 Instruction-level Parallelism (slides, video )
Aug 29 Modern multicore processors (slides; video ) Assignment 1 out

Sep 3 Parallel programming models (slides; video )
Sep 5 CUDA Programming(slides , video (part 1), video (part 2))

Sep 8 Graphic processing units and CUDA (Continued) (slides , video (part 1), video (part 2))
Sep 10 Parallel programming basics (slides , video ) Assignment 1 due, assignment 2 out
Sep 12 Work distribution and scheduling (slides , video )

Sep 15 Locality, communication, and contention (slides , video )
Sep 17 Guest lecture (Sheng Xu, Daniel Kroening, Amazon)
Sep 19 Snooping-based cache coherence (slides, video (part 1), video (part 2), video (part 3))

Sep 20 Directory-based cache coherence (slides, video (part 1), video (part 2))
Sep 24 Snooping implementation (slides, video (part 1), video (part 2)) Assignment 2 due, Assignment 3 out
Sep 26 Virtual Memory (slides, video)

Sep 29 Interconnection networks (slides, video (part 1), video (part 2), exam review slides) exam review video (NOTE: ignore the discussion of exam logistics - it is outdated))
Oct 1 Exam 1
Oct 3 Memory consistency (slides , video)

Oct 6 Implementing synchronization (slides, video (part 1), video (part 2), video (part 3))
Oct 8 Fine-grained synchronization, lock-free programming (slides, video (part 1), video (part 2), video (part 3)) Assignment 3 extended, Assignment 4 out
Oct 10 Fine-grained synchronization, lock-free programming continued.

Oct 20 Heterogenous parallelism (slides, video (part 1), video (part 2), video (part 3))
Oct 22 Domain-specific programming languages (slides, video)
Oct 24 Domain-specific programming on graphs (slides , video)

Oct 27 Parallel Deep Learning: Basics (slides, video)
Oct 29 Parallel Deep Learning: Data Parallelism (slides, video)
Oct 31 Parallel Deep Learning: Model and Pipeline Parallelism (slides , video for model parallelism, video for pipeline parallelism)
Nov 7 Exam 2