#Serial processing serial#

#Serial processing serial#

The block-stacking task is the same for each simulated computer system, both the 4-6 person parallel processing group and the serial processing 'group' of one student. Give each of these students a bin with 18 blocks of a single color. 4-6 students will work together as a team, representing the individual processors of a parallel computer system.Give this student the bin with the large collection of multicolored blocks.

One student in each group will play the role of the serial or single computer processor.In each group, assign students to the following roles: For a group of 6 students, prepare 5 bins with 18 blocks of a single color in each bin and one bin with 18 blocks of each of 5 colors (90 blocks total).Īrrange students into groups of 5-7 students per group.If the group has 5 students, prepare 4 bins with 18 blocks of a single color in each bin and one bin with 18 blocks of each of 4 colors (72 total blocks) using the same colors as the 4 individual color bins.The activity can readily be modified for smaller groups of 5 or 6 students as follows: These instructions presume that groups of 7 students will participate in the activity. Keep the different colors segregated by color in different areas of the bin. In the seventh bin, place 18 blocks of each color (a total of 108 blocks!).For example, bin 1 would contain 18 red blocks, bin 2 would contain 18 blue blocks, etc.

In the first six bins, place 18 blocks of the same (or similar) colors into the first bin, 18 blocks of a different color into the second bin, and so on.

7 small bins or bowls to hold groups of blocks.

one set of18 blocks of each of the six colors (108 total blocks).

6 sets of 18 blocks - each set should be a single, distinct color or similar shades (e.g.

Students will learn that supercomputers make extensive use of the parallel processing approach, which makes them much faster at performing complex calculations than they otherwise would be.

Students will experience the significantly greater speed of the parallel processing approach over the serial processing approach via a hands-on activity with blocks.

Students will learn about two major approaches to computing: serial processing and parallel processing.

Supercomputers use thousands of parallel processors to solve extremely complex problems in a fraction of the time required by single-processor computers. This uneven race shows how a computer using a parallel processing approach can solve problems much more quickly than a computer using a single serial processor. This type of optimisation is not only applicable if adapting the workload to HPC or a supercomputer, but also applicable for increasing the efficiency of commercial cloud resources and reducing cost.Students learn the difference between parallel processing and serial processing computer systems by racing to complete a task of stacking blocks. The same is also important when the GPU dependent task is running, where the tasks can be scaled over more GPUs for a shorter period, and the many CPU cores and a large amount of memory that were needed for the pre-processing can be released and reactivated when needed for post-processing. This allows the CPU hungry tasks to be spread over more CPU resources to reduce the runtime, as well as ensuring that expensive hardware like GPU is not reserved and paid for while waiting for the pre-processing task to have the data available for the GPU. This increases your costs and reduces the ability to scale the workload.Īt the Norwegian Competence Centre for HPC we help customers split up the workflow into individual tasks, where the hardware requirements and task dependencies are defined at the scheduler level. The expensive CPU, memory or GPU might be idling when the other resources are used. When a workflow like this runs for days or weeks, you must reserve a computing resource that satisfies all the workflow requirements, like many CPU cores, a lot of memory and maybe a GPU.