Collaborative Research: CyberTraining: Conceptualization: Planning a Sustainable Ecosystem for Incorporating Parallel and Distributed Computing into Undergraduate Education

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In this era of pervasive multicore machines, GPUs, cloud services, big data, machine learning, and the Internet of Things, there is a critical need for an institute to create a sustainable, discipline-wide ecosystem for incorporating parallel and distributed computing (PDC) into undergraduate computing curricula. Such an institute would support the community of educators, students, and other stakeholders, with the goal of developing a workforce that is ready to meet the challenges of working with current and future computing fabrics. The investigators propose planning for such an institute (iPDC) that can help eliminate the longstanding barrier of the sequential computing paradigm such that, analogous to the establishment of the object oriented paradigm, the PDC paradigm is naturally integrated into Computer Science (CS) and Computer Engineering (CE) curricula across various institutions as recommended by the 2013 ACM/IEEE Computer Science Curricula and now by ABET.Through the network of funded and unfunded collaborators, established contacts with instructors at institutions serving underrepresented groups, and outreach efforts, the project will robustly engage with stakeholder communities through four well-structured planning workshops, weekly teleconferences, and feedback and dissemination activities to formulate the key attributes of the institute.Broadening PDC education will further enable advances in science and engineering, which depend increasingly on PDC systems, by providing the next generation of practitioners and researchers with the necessary skills and knowledge to effectively exploit them. The curriculum standards, adoption, and dissemination activities will have synergistic international components. Overall, this project will facilitate a rich exchange of ideas within the community.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.