Materials Developed for Graduate Coursework

The Dark Side of Interpersonal Communication

Advanced Networking

Operating Systems

Advanced Software Engineering

Bioinformatics Algorithms

Distributed Systems

Work for the seminar class in distributed systems. Material covered is from the book Distributed Systems, Principles and Paradigms, by Andrew S. Tanenbaum and Maarten van Steen.

Presentation Materials

These presentation materials are constructed using the LaTeX beamer class. If you would like the raw Tex of any presentation please feel free to email.

Parallel Algorithms

Work done for the seminar class, Parallel Algorithms. Material covered is from several sources, which are listed at the end of this section, as well as Parallel Computation, Models and Methods, by Akl. This book is out of print.

The Convex Hull Problem

The convex hull problem can be visualized by the analogy of a rubber band and nails in a board. Picture a cartesian plane as a board, and an imaginary set of points in the plane as nails in a board. A rubber band is stretched to the edges of the board and then let go. As it relaxes, it forms a boundary containing all the nails.

Convex hull of a non-convex set

The problem generalizes to three or more dimensions. In the presentation, the Divide and Conquer Algorithm is described for both RAM and PRAM architectures. There is also a description of the BSP model and an algorithm for finding the convex hull on a BSP machine.

The BSR presentation was created using Beamer, a LaTeX package for creating presentations.

Presentation Materials

Papers

[1] F.P. Preparata and S.J. Hong, "Convex hulls of finite sets of points in two and three dimensions," Commun. ACM, vol. 20, no. 2, pp. 87-93, 1977.
[2] L.G. Valiant, "A bridging model for parallel computation," Commun. ACM, vol. 33, no.8, pp.103-111, 1990.
[3] M.T. Goodrich, "Randomized fully-scalable bsp techniques for multi-searching and convex hull construction," in SODA '97: Proceedings of the eighth annual ACM-SIAM symposium on Discrete algorithms, (Philadelphia, PA, USA), pp.767-776, Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics, 1997.
[4]R. Miller and Q. F. Stout, "Efficient parallel convex hull algorithms," IEEE Trans. Comput., vol. 37, no. 12, pp. 1605-1618, 1988.
[5]D. Seme and J.-F. Myoupo, "Efficient BSR-based parallel algorithms for geometrical problems," in Parallel and Distributed Processing, 2001. Proceedings. Ninth Euromicro Workshop on, pp. 265-272, IEEE, 2001.
Contact me with questions:
John P. Daigle

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