Practical Study of Parallel Algorithms - by Kevin Gordon

This is the paper I wrote for my final year project at the University of Warwick. I include it here for personal reference, and also in the hope that someone else will also find this useful.

http://www.kevingordon.org.uk/projects/bsp/experimental-parlallel-computing-final-report.pdf

Abstract

This project gives an introduction to the field of parallel computing and the parallel computing model: BSP (Bulk Synchronous Parallelism). The aim of this project was to carry out the implementation and analysis of two BSP problems. The parallel broadcast problem and parallel matrix multiplication were implemented, several experiments were run, and the results were analysed. Analysis of the results revealed that the experimental results didn’t always match what the BSP model predicted, and this was highly dependent on both the type of architecture running the code and the optimisation of the code.