3.0

credits

Average Course Rating

This course studies parallelism in data science, drawing examples from data analytics, statistical programming, and machine learning. It focuses mostly on the Python programming ecosystem but will use C/C++ to accelerate Python and Java to explore shared-memory threading. It explores parallelism at all levels, including instruction level parallelism (pipelining and vectorization), shared-memory multicore, and distributed computing. Concepts from computer architecture and operating systems will be developed in support of parallelism, including Moore’s law, the memory hierarchy, caching, processes/threads, and concurrency control. The course will cover modern data-parallel programming frameworks, including Dask, Spark, Hadoop!, and Ray. The course will not cover GPU deep-learning frameworks nor CUDA. The course is suitable for second-year undergraduate CS majors and graduate students from other science and engineering disciplines that have prior programming experience. Required course background: Data Structures, Computer System Fundamentals, and familiarity with Python.