Teaching Multithreaded Programming to Computer Science Undergraduates

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With the continuing emergence of multithreaded computation as a powerful vehicle for science and engineering, the need for an introduction to multithreaded programming for scientists and engineers is high. All popular operating systems already support multithreaded programming and the popular POSIX Pthreads standard has just been approved. It is the right time to teach students this new technology. In so doing, students will be able to carry the skills over to their jobs and increase this nation's competitiveness. The primary goal of the project is to design a set of comprehensive and flexible course materials for teaching multithreaded programming to sophomore and junior students so that it can be used across several courses or in a dedicated one. A secondary goal is to develop pedagogical programming aids for the students to visualize and experiment with various concepts in multithreaded programming. These concepts include program behavior and execution visualization, deadlock and race condition detection, and software metrics for measuring the complexity of students' programs. By consolidating many potential uses in a single place, this proposed project will improve students' understanding of multithreaded programming so that it can be used in several courses and applications. A basic understanding of the technology will help non-CS students to enhance their level of competence and allow them to use multithreaded programming with confidence in their respective fields. The impact of this project may also include an improved retention rate of students and an increased employability of graduates in multithreaded application and system software development.