Analogies for teaching parallel computing to inexperienced programmers

Abstract

Parallel computing is increasingly a requirement of Computational Science and Engineering (CSE) software because problems of interest are very large and hardware systems are becoming parallel through multicore technologies. Inexperienced programmers-non-computer scientists with one semester to a few years of programming experience-are crucial to CSE software development because academic research teams rely on them as application developers. For this group, the basic concepts of parallelism can be explained by analogies rather than through exploring the specifics of various technologies. These analogies are also useful for computer scientists who are new to parallel computing.

Large scale research data archiving: Training for an inconvenient technology

“…OU has extensive experience providing education, outreach and training to a broad variety of audiences [17][18][19][20][21][22][23], so development of the Oklahoma PetaStore training has fit straightforwardly into extant structures. Because of both obvious and subtle operational differences between the PetaStore and typical filesystems, and the risk that particular styles of use can detrimentally affect system performance and resiliency, one-on-one or one-on-few PetaStore training is required before access to the PetaStore is granted.…”

Using a shared, remote cluster for teaching HPC

“…• education via a workshop series, "Supercomputing in Plain English" (SiPE) [10,11,12,13,14], available both live in person and remotely via videoconferencing, focusing on the fundamental concepts of cyberinfrastructure rather than deep technical issues, and targeting not primarily Computer Scientists but especially domain Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM) researchers (14 Oklahoma academic institutions to date);…”

“…This presentation uses analogies, storytelling and play to capture the essential issues of HPC, especially parallel computing. One of the core components of this presentation is a "theatre" exercise, known as the Jigsaw Puzzle analogy [13], depicting, via a toy problem, both shared memory and distributed parallelism, covering contention and communication overhead, load balancing and efficiency, and a variety of other parallel computing issues, both rapidly and compellingly. This presentation has been very helpful not only in education about HPC but also in promoting interest in parallel computing statewide.…”

ACt-PBL: An Adaptive Approach to Teach Multi-core Computing in University Education

“…Also an interactive learning environment comprising of eText with a multi-dimensional navigation system is described in [11] which makes use of archetypes, a software engineering methodology to teach multi-core programming. Several other pedagogical tools, hardware, software models and learning environments [2,7,10] have been proposed earlier to teach multi-core concepts. However, it is important that the right level of understanding is given to the students on the conceptualization of parallel computing and to apply these concepts in real-time instead of teaching mere programming concepts.…”