You are trying to bake 3 blueberry pound cakes. Cake ingredients are as follows:

1 cup butter, softened

1 cup sugar

4 large eggs

1 teaspoon vanilla extract

1/2 teaspoon salt

1/4 teaspoon nutmeg

1 1/2 cups flour

1 cup blueberries

The recipe for a single cake is as follows:

Step 1: Preheat oven to 325°F (160°C). Grease and flour your cake pan.

Step 2: In large bowl, beat together with a mixer butter and sugar at medium speed until light and fluffy. Add eggs, vanilla, salt and nutmeg. Beat until thoroughly blended. Reduce mixer speed to low and add flour, 1/2 cup at a time, beating just until blended.

Step 3: Gently fold in blueberries. Spread evenly in prepared baking pan. Bake for 60 minutes.

1. Your job is to cook 3 cakes as efficiently as possible. Assuming that you only have one oven large enough to hold one cake, one large bowl, one cake pan, and one mixer, come up with a schedule to make three cakes as quickly as possible. Identify the bottlenecks in completing this task. 

2. Assume now that you have three bowls, 3 cake pans and 3 mixers. How much faster is the process now that you have additional resources?

3. Assume now that you have two friends that will help you cook, and that you have a large oven that can accommodate all three cakes. How will this change the schedule you arrived at in Exercise 6.2.1 above?

4. Compare the cake-making task to computing 3 iterations of a loop on a parallel computer. Identify data-level parallelism and task-level parallelism in the cake-making loop.

Exercise 6.2.1

First, write down a list of your daily activities that you typically do on a weekday. For instance, you might get out of bed, take a shower, get dressed, eat breakfast, dry your hair, brush your teeth. Make sure to break down your list so you have a minimum of 10 activities.