Chapter 6: Parallel Processing

Various multiprocessing technologies, from chip level to warehouse scale computers. Don't do too deep of a read of this chapter (and in particular, feel free to skip 6.9 through 6.12).

Read Section 6.1
Do a light read of Section 6.2 to get a feel for the main take away of this section: it's hard to get performance improvements by adding more cores. But we're not going to ask you to do calculations like are done in this section.
Read Section 6.3 a bit closer, mainly to get a feel for a difference between SISD, MIMD, SIMD, SPMD, and Vector.
Read Section 6.4 a bit closer and learn the difference between the different types of multithreading
Do a light read of Section 6.5, focussing on the difference between UMA and NUMA.
Section 6.6 is about GPUs. GPUs change every time the wind changes direction. Read the section introduction and "An Introcution to the NVIDIA Architecture", but you only need to skim the rest of the section.
Section 6.7 (Clusters, etc) is a fairly light read without too much detail.
In Section 6.8, pay attention to the different topologies.
Sections 6.9, 6.10, 6.11, and 6.12 go into more depth than we're interested in CS 251, so feel free to skip them.
Section 6.13 (Fallacies and Pitfalls) and 6.14 (Concluding remarks) are light but worth reading.