Preparing students for ubiquitous parallelism

Ernst, Daniel; Wittman, Barry; Harvey, Brian; Murphy, Tom; Wrinn, Michael

doi:10.1145/1508865.1508917

Cited by 6 publications

(6 citation statements)

References 2 publications

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“…Most recently, the pedagogical trend has been to integrate parallelism into the entire CS curriculum [13,14,16], from the entry-level courses. Ernst and Stevenson [14] attempted to increase students' exposure to concurrency early and often in their curriculum through multi-threading programming.…”

Section: Support For a Pedagogy Of Parallelismmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Ernst and Stevenson [14] attempted to increase students' exposure to concurrency early and often in their curriculum through multi-threading programming. Wittman [13] also reported integration of concurrency into the freshmen courses through threaded programming. Their challenge was how to bootstrap concurrent programming with students having early, weak programming knowledge and skills.…”

Section: Support For a Pedagogy Of Parallelismmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…These were good steps of training students in a parallel thinking mindset. However, to program with concurrency concepts such as threads by the end of the first semester required acceleration in teaching Java in the first month [13]. Forcing parallel constructs could actually complicate the transition to parallel thinking in the sense that students may not learn either sequentiality or parallel thinking well.…”

Section: Support For a Pedagogy Of Parallelismmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Encouraging parallel thinking through explicit coordination modeling

Lin

Tatar

2011

Proceedings of the 42nd ACM Technical Symposium on Computer Science Education

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Parallel thinking is a mindset that allows people to create support for activities that happen concurrently in a program. It crosscuts extant computer science boundaries, including parallel processing, network programming and multi-user systems, indeed, any system that involves the distribution and reintegration of work. Recent efforts to integrate parallelism across the CS curriculum begin to address the support of parallel thinking. We approach the pedagogy of parallel thinking by teaching students to model coordination explicitly using a specialized coordination language. We report a study of an experimental class taking this approach, finding that advanced CS students lack a good understanding of coordination but that the explicit modeling of coordination can address this lack.

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Section: Support For a Pedagogy Of Parallelismmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Support For a Pedagogy Of Parallelismmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Support For a Pedagogy Of Parallelismmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Encouraging parallel thinking through explicit coordination modeling

Lin

Tatar

2011

Proceedings of the 42nd ACM Technical Symposium on Computer Science Education

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“…As such, XMT provides students a simple-to-use alternative to MPI. As has been noted by others [3,5,8,9,10] the complexity of coding in MPI or even OpenMP can be quite overwhelming for a beginning student. With XMT the coding overhead is instead very light.…”

Section: Explicit Multi-threadingmentioning

confidence: 94%

Is teaching parallel algorithmic thinking to high school students possible?

Torbert

Vishkin

Tzur

et al. 2010

Proceedings of the 41st ACM Technical Symposium on Computer Science Education

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All students at our high school are required to take at least one course in Computer Science prior to their junior year. They are also required to complete a year-long senior project associated with a specific in-house laboratory, one of which is the Computer Systems Lab. To prepare students for this experience the lab offers elective courses at the post-AP Computer Science level. Since the early 1990s one of these electives has focused on parallel computing. The course enrolls approximately 40 students each year for two semesters of instruction. The lead programming language is C and topics include a wide array of industry-standard and experimental tools. Since the 2007-2008 school year we have included a unit on parallel algorithmic thinking (PAT) using the Explicit Multi-Threading (XMT) system [11,12]. We describe our experiences using this system after self-studying the approach from a publicly available tutorial. Overall, this article provides significant evidence regarding the unique teachability of the XMT PAT approach, and advocates using it broadly in Computer Science education.

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“…Others have begun to address the curricular changes that are needed to answer this challenge [5][7] [8], and there is general agreement that experiential learning -in which students receive hands-on experiences using a system -is pedagogically preferable to a handsoff, theoretical approach. However, hardware is needed to provide those hands-on experiences.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

A cluster for CS education in the manycore era

Adams

Hoobeboom

Walz

2011

Proceedings of the 42nd ACM Technical Symposium on Computer Science Education

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Traditional Beowulf clusters have been homogeneous platforms for distributed-memory MIMD parallelism. However, the shift to multicore architectures has made shared-memory MIMD parallelism increasingly important, and inexpensive manycore GPGPUs have revived SIMD parallelism. This paper presents a case study in designing and building a heterogeneous cluster as a learning platform for tera-scale distributed-and shared-memory MIMD parallelism, and GPGPU parallelism.

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Preparing students for ubiquitous parallelism

Cited by 6 publications

References 2 publications

Encouraging parallel thinking through explicit coordination modeling

Encouraging parallel thinking through explicit coordination modeling

Is teaching parallel algorithmic thinking to high school students possible?

A cluster for CS education in the manycore era

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