See information on the previous year’s course here.
The course is open for the entire academic year 2024–2025, specifically from 1.9.2024 to 31.8.2025. You can complete it on your own schedule and there are no other deadlines.
If you are unable to enrol on the course in SISU (e.g. because you don’t have a study right for the whole duration), that is not necessary. Make sure to request credits before your study right ends, however.
Join the course Discord channel via https://study.cs.helsinki.fi/discord/join/ppc. This is the primary avenue for discussions about the course.
Antti Laaksonen (ahslaaks@cs.helsinki.fi) is responsible for the course administration.
The course is designed to be completed in six intensive weeks, plus the prerequisite test. You may wish to complete the course at a slower pace. For instance, in 2021 the University of Helsinki version of the course stretched each “week” into two calendar weeks.
Lecture material and recordings of lectures given by Jukka Suomela are available at https://ppc.cs.aalto.fi/.
Exercises are described and submitted at https://ppc-exercises.cs.aalto.fi/course/hy2024.
The coursework is divided into exercises and tasks. The tasks within each exercise focus on the same computational problem, but the intended techniques to solve them are different in each task.
Tasks are numbered according to the week they are intended to be worked on. It is not necessary to complete, much less get full points in all of them to achieve a good grade. However, weeks 1–5 have mandatory tasks, each of which you will need to get at least one point in to get course credits.
Some tasks have specific instructions that you should follow. Please read those and more about the structure of the course below.
Read the instructions at https://ppc-exercises.cs.aalto.fi/help carefully.
Some details in the instructions only apply to lecture courses with weekly deadlines. Specific to this course,
There is a feature for testing and iterating on your code remotely, which you may want to utilize to get more accurate measurements or especially if you do not have an NVIDIA GPU with CUDA development tools installed.
If, for example, you used this command to test locally:
./grading test
then you can add the --remote flag to run the command remotely instead.
./grading test --remote
When trying this for the first time, you will be instructed to configure an API token. Obtain an API token at https://ppc-exercises.cs.aalto.fi/token, and paste it into a configuration file in one of the suggested locations.
Your code and the specified tests are then sent to our grading servers, where they are run on the same hardware as normal submissions are. The output should otherwise be the same as when running locally, but it is only shown when the whole command is completed, so be patient.
Be mindful of other users, as the resources are limited and shared with normal submissions.
Grading is described at the end of the course page, https://ppc-exercises.cs.aalto.fi/course/hy2024. The minimum amount of points for course credits is 54. Additionally, you must have at least one point from every mandatory task, i.e. CP1, MF2, CP3a, SO4 and CP5.
Once you are satisfied with the points and grade you have achieved, contact Antti Laaksonen (ahslaaks@cs.helsinki.fi) and provide the email address associated with your account and your student number so we can register your credits in SISU. We may still review some of your submissions at this point, but you will be able to go back and fix the issues if it affects your grade.
This week consists of the task Pre0, the prerequisite test worth one course point. It is not required, but some knowledge of C++ is assumed as prerequisite for the course. It is possible to complete the course without much prior knowledge in C++, but this will be more challenging and require additional self-study.
Introduction to the course and instruction-level parallelism.
Tasks this week: CP1, IS2, MF1
Mandatory task: CP1
You are introduced to the exercises CP (correlated pairs), IS (image segmentation) and MF (median filter). The tasks CP1 and MF1 have you implement baseline CPU solutions to these exercises, which are then improved upon using various techniques in further weeks.
Multicore parallelism with OpenMP and vector operations.
Tasks this week: CP2a, CP2b, CP2c, MF2
Mandatory task: MF2
Important: In tasks CP2abc, it is intended that you only use one technique in each task, and not e.g. all previous techniques combined. CP2a is about instruction-level parallelism, CP2b is about multicore parallelism, and CP2c is about vector operations. The techniques will be combined next week.
Combining vectorization, instruction-level and multicore parallelism. Reusing data in registers and cache.
Tasks this week: CP3a, CP3b
Mandatory task: CP3a
It is intentionally very challenging to get full points from these tasks. You will need to apply your knowledge and experiment with different approaches.
Introduction to GPU and CUDA programming.
Tasks this week: CP4, IS4, SO4
Mandatory task: SO4
Important: Remember to check for CUDA errors following the instructions in https://ppc.cs.aalto.fi/ch4/v0/. Read the SO exercise rules https://ppc-exercises.cs.aalto.fi/course/hy2024/so carefully
GPU programming in depth.
Tasks this week: CP5, SO5
Mandatory task: CP5
Important: In task SO5, you should follow the general idea of quicksort for multiple levels of recursion, before falling back to a different single-threaded algorithm.
Assorted algorithmic techniques for designing high performance parallel programs. Concluding the course.
Tasks this week: IS6a, IS6b, SO6
There are also the additional tasks CP9a, IS9a, LLM9a, MF9a and X9a which you may want to do for further insight and course points.
If you find mistakes or bugs in either the course material or the grading system and report them on the Discord channel, you can get 1 course point via task X9a.
Important: For CP9a, you must use Strassen’s algorithm. Submitting a solution from another CP task will not be accepted.