A Proposed Model for Teaching Advanced Parallel Computing
and Related Topics
Author/Presenters
Event Type
Workshop
Education
TimeMonday, November 13th12:15pm -
12:40pm
Location505
DescriptionThe heterogeneous, multi-core and many-core
architecture of modern computers offers opportunities to
solve critical problems in science and engineering as
well as parallel programming challenges to those who
wish to use them. This problem includes computer science
programs but extends to a wide variety of STEM programs
where computation has become an integral part of the
research infrastructure. Students from science and
engineering majors often have limited programming
experience. Instructors from these fields are often not
knowledgeable enough about the techniques used for
efficient parallel computing to create and run these
courses independently. Even in places where there is
faculty expertise to teach the courses, they tend to be
low in enrollment and thus are less likely to be
offered. This leaves students who wish to learn the
advanced concepts of parallel and large-scale computing
to seek resources elsewhere or stumble on blindly in
their field and pick things up as they go. Although some
of the required content is available online as
self-paced or MOOC style courses, those approaches are
not effective in getting the majority of the target
students the level of expertise they require. Both the
Blue Waters and XSEDE projects have experimented with
collaborative online courses that have proved to be an
excellent model for resolving some of these problems. In
this paper, we define the problems more fully and then
describe our proposed collaborative model. We then
conclude with a discussion about the challenges of
implementing the model more permanently and at
scale.
