An Undergraduate Laboratory for Teaching Parallel Computing

随着并行计算成为获得巨大性能收益的一种经济高效的方法，这些高性能计算系统正在改变科学和工程所有领域的研究和开发的性质。然而，需要有经验的科学家来利用并行带来的机会，这要求大学修改课程，教授计算机科学、工程和其他理科学生有效地使用这项新技术。这笔赠款使该大学能够在计算机和信息科学系建立一个并行计算实验室。该项目的重点是建立一个场和一个独立的工作站级微处理器的专用集群，使学生能够利用并行计算的各种范例并提供准确的性能反馈。这个实验室为二年级的并行计算基础课程创造了必要的环境。它还允许将并行性整合到现有的核心和高级计算机科学课程以及其他科学和工程课程中。

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.