Collaborative Research: CCLI-Responding to manycore: A strategy for injecting parallel computing education throughout the computer science curriculum

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Computer Science (31)This collaborative project between St. Olaf College and Macalester College is developing a collection of ten learning modules with supporting software in the area of parallel computing. For the foreseeable future, the dominant factor in CPU hardware performance will be the number of cores per CPU package, not speedup within an individual core. Thus, today's dual- and quad- multicore processors will soon give way to CPUs with dozens, and eventually thousands, of cores. To prepare today's computer science students for the manycore world that will be the reality during their careers, parallel computational concepts and programming must achieve a new prominence in the computer science curriculum. The modules developed in this project range in sophistication from the first-year introductory level to the fourth-year advanced technical elective level. The modules begin with Hadoop and progress to OpenMP and MPI. The modularity and varying complexity of the modules allows institutions to adapt them to their curriculum from a single course to a complete vertical curricular integration. The modules are supported by a selection of parallel platform packages, including software and documentation, that enable the modules to be used on a variety of hardware platforms. The modules are being freely disseminated through an interactive website, the National Digital Science Library, and through a workshop at the annual meeting of the ACM Special Interest Group for Computer Science Education. The project includes a comprehensive assessment and evaluation plan coordinated by an independent evaluator.