Customer Reviews

Parallel Computer Architecture: A Hardware/Software Approach (The Morgan Kaufmann Series in Computer Architecture and Design)

5 star:		(3)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

this book was the recommended textbook for parallel architecture course which i took, it is a great book,since it covers the latest fields in parallel computers.But too difficult for a beginner, cause topics are explained in an advanced way, assuming a previous knowledge in parallel processing subjects.I find it more suitable for graduate or profissionals in this field rather than undergraduate students.

I guest lecture in a graduate level architecture course, and I always enjoy using this book as reference material when I want to lecture on cache coherency. This book is written from the correct perspective that obtaining parallelism is not easy, and so most of the book is spent on the various issues that come up when building a parallel machine. It is probably a good idea to read this book if you want to write parallel code, or if you just want to know why large scale supercomputers are not in wide use today.

Previous uniprocessor architecture knowledge is required for the more interesting chapters. Thus, this book acts as a nice sequel to Henessey and Patterson.

This book appears to be an excellent *reference* in terms of extremely detailed aspects of parallel computing architectures.

However, as a textbook, it falls far short. The information presented in the text is an extremely difficult read (from a format perspective). The sample problems presented in the body of the text bear little or no relationship to the exercise at the end of each chapter. This makes it difficult or impossible to relate the exercises back to the information presented in the chapter. Since there is no answer key, you're left guessing if you've correctly answered them.

I find it baffling that anyone would use this text in a college classroom since it makes little or no effort to actually *teach* the material it presents.

I have read this book and its a very good book which explains all the details ranging from cache architecture to the basics of parallel computer programming. I have not seen any book that talks in detail about SMP and cc-numa.

I think the book is not especially well written. Sentences
are long and in some cases unprecise or directly wrong.

The book often does often not provide sharp and good definitions and
it is not easy to extract the information contents, compared to many other books within this or related fields,
for an example "Computer Architecture and Parallel Processing"
by Hwang and Briggs, or books by M. Morris Mano.

The book repeats lots of things. Its not well written. Don't buy this book. You will fall sick reading this in a few days.