Computer Sciences Commons^™

Parallel Linear Congruential Generators With Prime Moduli, Michael Mascagni

Faculty Publications

Linear congruential generators (LCGs) remain the most popular method of pseudorandom number generation on digital computers. Ease of implementation has favored implementing LCGs with power-of-two moduli. However, prime modulus LCGs are superior in quality to power-of-two modulus LCGs, and the use of a Mersenne prime minimizes the computational cost of generation. When implemented for parallel computation, quality becomes an even more compelling issue. We use a full-period exponential sum as the measure of stream independence and present a method for producing provably independent streams of LCGs in parallel by utilizing an explicit parameterization of all of the primitive elements module …

Common Runtime Support For High Performance Languages, Geoffrey C. Fox

Northeast Parallel Architecture Center

Widespread adoption of parallel computing depends on the availability of improved software environments. An essential component of these environments will be high-level languages. Several languages for exploiting data-parallelism (or task-parallelism) have been developed, or are under development. The stated goal of this project has been to provide a public domain infrastructure for runtime support of these high-level languages. The targeted languages include parallel versions of Fortran and C++, but our intention has been to provide uniform runtime support for many source languages.

Sorting In Parallel, Ran Libeskind-Hadas

All HMC Faculty Publications and Research

In 1842, L.F. Menabrea anticipated the benefits of parallel computing in an article that appeared in the Swiss Journal Bibliotheque universelle de Geneve:

When a long series of identical computations is to be performed, such as those required for the formation of numerical tables, the machine can be brought into play so as to give several results at the same time, which will greatly abridge the whole amount of the processes.

Although more than a century passed before Menabrea's vision became a reality, today parallel computers with hundreds and even thousands of processors are used in a broad range …