252-0029-00L Parallel Programming

FS 2025

T. Hoefler, B. Solenthaler

Basic Information

• Semester: Spring 2026
• Course Number: 252-0029-00L
• Lecturers: T. Hoefler, B. Solenthaler
• Edoz: Open in Course Catalogue
• Lectures: Mo 10:15-12:00 and Tue 10:15-12:00 both in HG F 5 and HG F7
• Exercises: Wed 16:15-18:00, Fri 10:15-12:00
• Head TAs: Jackson Stanhope (first part), Timo Schneider (second part)
• TAs: TBD

News:

• 16.02.26: The website is online.

Overview

The purpose of this course is to introduce students to parallel programming. By the end of the course students will be able to design and implement working parallel programs in traditional (e.g., Java Threads) and emerging parallel programming models. Moreover, students will master fundamental concepts in parallelism and be able to reason about the correctness, performance, and the construction of parallel programs using different parallel programming paradigms (e.g., task parallelism, data parallelism) and mechanisms (e.g., threads, tasks, locks, communication channels). Finally, the course will examine how parallel programming methodologies can be applied in different algorithmic domains by investigating parallelization of algorithms.

Topics include:

• Basic parallel programming concepts
• Parallel programming using Java
• Synchronization techniques
• Case studies of building parallel programs starting from sequential algorithms

Course Content

Main text and reference book

• Introduction to Java Programming, 2014. Daniel Liang. ISBN-13: 9780133813463
• Java Concurrency in Practice, 2006. Brian Goetz, Tim Peierls, Joshua Bloch, Joseph Bowbeer, David Holmes, Doug Lea. ISBN-13: 9780321349606
• The Art of Multiprocessor Programming, 2011. Maurice Herlihy, Nir Shavit. Morgan Kaufmann. Also available online in the ETH network.

Related resources, text and reference books

• Sophomoric Parallelism and Concurrency (from: spac)
• The Little Book of Semaphores
• Programming concurrency on the JVM, 2011. Venkat Subramaniam
• Structured Parallel Programming: Patterns for Efficient Computation, 2012. Michael McCool, Arch Robison, James Reinders.
• Patterns for Parallel Programming, 2004. Timothy G. Mattson, Beverly A. Sanders, Berna L. Massingill.
• A minicourse on multithreaded programming. Charles E. Leiserson, Harald Prokop.
• (Optional) Inside the Java Virtual Machine. 2000. Bill Venners.

Introduction to Java books (freely available)

• How to Think Like a Computer Scientist, 2012. Allen B. Downey.
• Introduction to Programming Using Java, 2011. David J. Eck.

All material is available on Moodle.

Date	Title
	Introduction & Course Overview
	Java Recap and JVM Overview
	Introduction to Threads and Synchronization (Part I)
	Introduction to Threads and Synchronization (Part II)
/td>	Introduction to Threads and Synchronization (Part III)
/td>	Parallel Architectures: Parallelism on the Hardware Level
	Basic Concepts in Parallelism
	Divide & Conquer and Executor Service
	DAG and ForkJoin Framework
	Parallel Algorithms (Part I)
	Parallel Algorithms (Part II)
	Shared Memory Concurrency, Locks and Data Races
	Virtual Threads
	Exam Preparation (First Half)

Exercises

All material (exercise slides and exercises) is available on Moodle.

All exercises start in the first week of the semester.

Wednesday 16:15 - 18:00

Friday 10:15 - 12:00

Exercises

Week	Title	Due Date
1	Introduction

Exams and Grading

There is a written, centralized exam after the end of the semester. Exercise sessions are not graded.

• 100% of grade determined by final Exam