A Planning Workshop on Curriculum Standards for Parallel and Distributed Computing

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This award supports a workshop to explore the state of parallel and distributed computing education and curricula, assess national education needs in the area of parallel and distributed computing, and provide action plans and recommend mechanisms for how best to address curricular needs in short and long term. The planning workshop and its related set of activities will draw experts from various stakeholders, and engage the parallel and distributed computing community as providers of information on the current state of practice as well as consumers and evaluator of its results. There is an urgent need for curricular guidance on parallel and distributed computing. This need emanates both from rapid technological changes and from mass marketing of multicores and general-purpose graphics processing units. Educators struggle to determine the right balance between theory and practice, and to choose from the diverse set of models of computation, languages, software and hardware platforms, and tools. There are many stakeholders in this domain, including faculty and students, employers, researchers, authors, developers, users, and industry, all who can benefit from standards in curricula at various levels and in different courses which are impacted by parallel and distributed computing.The goal of the workshop is to involve all stakeholder experts working together and annually/biannually providing guidance on restructuring standard curricula across various courses and modules related to parallel and distributed computing. The community may employ these for teaching, for producing course material, textbooks and tutorials, setting standards for certifications and exams, and for creating programming environments and tools. The workshop involves collaboration among experts from all stakeholder groups to explore the needs and current problems, assess the state of parallel processing education across curricula, and lay out long term plans for setting up mechanisms to meet new curricular challenges. Two outcomes expected are an annual curricular workshop at the IEEE International Parallel and Distributed Processing Symposium (IPDPS), the IEEE's Computer Society Technical Committee on Parallel Processing (TCPP) flagship conference (2010 being held in Atlanta in April) and formation of TCPP's Standards Committee on Curriculum.