An Undergraduate Laboratory for Teaching Parallel Computing

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As parallel computing is becoming a cost effective way to achieve large performance gains, these high performance computing systems are changing the nature of research and development across all areas of science and engineering. However, skilled scientists are needed to exploit the opportunities that parallelism presents, which mandates that the university modify its cur- riculum to teach computer science, engineering, and other science students to use this new technology effectively. This grant enables the university to establish a parallel computing laboratory in the Department of Computer and Information Sciences. The project focuses on building a farm and a dedicated cluster of isolated workstation-class microprocessors, which enable students to exploit various paradigms of parallel computing and provide accurate performance feedback. This laboratory creates the necessary environment for a sophomore- level foundations course in parallel computing. It also allows for the integration of parallelism into existing core, and advanced, computer science courses, as well as other science and engineering courses.