AUS professor writes book on multicore and GPU programming

American University of Sharjah (AUS) professor Dr. Gerassimos Barlas recently published a textbook entitled Multicore and GPU Programming: An Integrated Approach. Published by Elsevier, the book is aimed at senior undergraduate and graduate students and offers a broad coverage of the key parallel computing skillsets and teaches the design and development of software capable of taking advantage of today's computing platforms incorporating CPU and GPU hardware, while explaining how to transition from sequential programming to a parallel computing paradigm.

Dr. Barlas, Professor of Computer Science at the Department of Computer Science and Engineering, said "Parallel computing has been given a fresh breath of life since the emergence of multicore architectures in the first decade of the new century. The new platforms demand a new approach to software development-one that blends the tools and established practices of the Network-of-Workstations (NoWs) era with emerging software platforms such as Compute Unified Device Architecture (CUDA)."

"This book tries to address this need by covering the dominant contemporary tools and techniques, both in isolation but also, most importantly, in combination with each other," added Dr. Barlas.

Dr. Barlas provides multiple examples and extensive case studies and the book allows readers to develop programs that run over distributed memory machines using Message Passing Interface (MPI), create multi-threaded applications with either libraries or directives, write optimized applications that balance the workload between available computing resources, and profile and debug programs targeting multicore machines.

Written over a period of two years, the book was initially begun while Dr. Barlas was on sabbatical leave in Fall 2012.