25th IEEE International Parallel & Distributed Processing Symposium

Intel Platinum Patron Night at IPDPS 2011 Intel Platinum Patron Night was a fantastic event, with a packed room of 170 attendees passionate about parallel programming in education. Watch the videos from Intel Platinum Patron Night to learn about using games to teach parallelism to undergraduates, recent innovations in design patterns, and hiring at Intel! Download the Intel Platinum Patron Night Presentation (pdf).   Opening Remarks Rowena Turner (Intel Corporation) View video Design Patterns in Practice and Teaching Michael Wrinn (Intel Corporation View video How to Use Games to Teach Parallelism to Undergraduates Ashish Amresh (Arizona State University at Polytechnic Campus) Amit Jindal (Intel Corporation) View video Choosing a Future Career at Intel Corporation Dani Napier (Intel Corporation) Lauren Dankiewicz (Intel Corporation) View video

The 1st NSF/TCPP Workshop on Parallel and Distributed Computing Education (EduPar-11) The Intel Academic Community and NSF are supporting the IEEE Computer Society Technical Committee on Parallel Processing (NSF/TCPP). NSF/TCPP is working to create a core curriculum for CS/CE undergraduates for parallel and distributed computing (PDC). The 1st workshop invited proposals from academia, industry, and other educational and research institutes to present on teaching PDC topics in undergraduate Computer Science and Engineering curriculum. Topics included: 1. Pedagogical issues in PDC 2. Novel ways of teaching PDC topics 3. Models for incorporating PDC topics in core CS/CE curriculum 4. Experience with incorporating PDC topics into core CS/CE courses. The Challenge of Teaching Program Performance Tuning David Padua (University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign) View video NSF/TCPP Curriculum Report and Panel Discussion Coordinator: Sushil Prasad (Georgia State) Committee members and Panelists: Chtchelkanova, Almadena (NSF), Das, Sajal (University of Texas at Arlington, NSF), Das, Chita (Penn State, NSF), Dehne, Frank (Carleton University, Canada), Gouda, Mohamed (University of Texas, Austin, NSF), Gupta, Anshul (IBM T.J. Watson Research Center), Jaja, Joseph (University of Maryland), Kant, Krishna (NSF, Intel), La Salle, Anita (NSF), LeBlanc, Richard (Seattle University), Lumsdaine, Andrew (Indiana University), Padua, David (University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign), Parashar, Manish (Rutgers, NSF), Patt, Yale (UT Austin), Prasad, Sushil (Georgia State University), Prasanna, Viktor (University of Southern California), Robert, Yves (INRIA, France), Rosenberg, Arnold (Colorado State University), Sahni, Sartaj (University of Florida), Shirazi, Behrooz (Washington State University), Sussman, Alan (University of Maryland), Weems, Chip (University of Massachusetts), and Wu, Jie (Temple University) View video Integrating Parallel and Distributed Computing Into Undergraduate Courses at All Levels Steven Bogaerts (Wittenberg University), Kyle Burke (Wittenberg University) and Eric Stahlberg (National Cancer Institute) View video Experiences of an Undergraduate Parallel Computing Course Bo Hong (Georgia Tech) View video Early Adopter: Integrating Concepts from Parallel and Distributed Computing into the Undergraduate Curriculum Eileen Kraemer (University of Georgia) View video Integration of Parallel Topics in the Undergraduate Curriculum, 2011 Joel Adams (Calvin College) View video ASU and Intel Collaboration in Parallel and Distributed Computation Violet Syrotiuk, Yinong Chen, Eric Kostelich, Yann-Hang Lee, Alex Mahalov and Gil Speyer (Arizona State) View video Parallel Computing: Keys to a Future in Computing Stephen Providence (Hampton University) View video Using Games to Teach Parallelism to Computer Science 2nd year and 3rd Year College Students Deepak Vembar and Amit Jindal (Intel) View video Teaching Parallel and Distributed Computing at Masaryk University Jiri Barnat, Lubos Brim and Ivana Cerna (Masaryk University, Czech Republic) View video Parallel Programming in the Computing Curriculum Ankur Gupta, Rahul Hardikar and Jon Sorenson (Butler University) View video PDC Modules for Every Level: A Comprehensive Model for Incorporating PDC Topics into the Existing Undergraduate Curriculum Konstantin Laufer, Chandra Sekharan and George K. Thiruvathukal (Loyola University Chicago) View video Teaching Parallel Computing to Lower-Division Undergraduates Peter Pacheco (University of San Francisco) View video Joint UIUC/UMD Parallel Algorithms/Programming Course David Padua (Urbana), Uzi Vishkin (Maryland) and Jeffrey Carver (University of Alabama) View video

Architecting Parallel Software: Design patterns in practice and teaching Design patterns can systematically identify reusable elements in software engineering, and have been particularly effective in codifying practice in object-oriented software. A team of researchers centered at UC Berkeley’s Parallel Computing Laboratory continues to investigate a design pattern approach to parallel software; the effort has matured to the point that an undergraduate course was delivered on the topic in Fall 2010. This talk will briefly describe the pattern language itself, then demonstrate its application in examples from both image processing and game design.

Michael Wrinn manages Intel's Innovative Software Education team, which collaborates with universities to bring parallel computing to the mainstream of undergraduate education. His prior assignments include managing Intel's software engineering lab in Shanghai, and directing the human interface technology research. He was Intel's representative to the committee which produced the first OpenMP specification, and remains active in the parallel computing community. Before joining Intel, Michael worked at Accelrys (San Diego), implementing commercial and research simulation codes on a wide variety of parallel/HPC systems. He holds a Ph.D. (in quantum mechanics) and a B.Sc.(math/chemistry/physics) from McGill University.

Teaching Parallelism Using Games Academic institutions do not have to spend expensive multi-core hardware to support game-based courses to teach parallelism.   We will discuss what teaching methodologies educators can use for integrating parallel computing curriculum inside a game engine. We will talk about the full game development process, from game design to game engineering and how parallelism is critical.   We will show five game demos that mirror current trends in the industry and how educators can use in these games in the classroom. We will also show the learning outcomes, what parallelism topics are appropriate to teach students at various levels.  We will demonstrate how to take games running serially and modify them to run parallel.

Ashish Amresh leads the Computer Gaming curriculum initiatives at the School of Computing and Informatics at Arizona State University. He completed his MS in computer science from ASU in 2000, then worked in the video game industry as a graphics engineer programmer, and returned to ASU to work on his doctorate in computer science. While working on his doctoral degree, Amresh led the efforts in building the prototype that eventually resulted in the launching of the Decision Theatre at ASU in May 2005. In the same year he was awarded the Graduate College Teaching Excellence Award.

An Intel veteran of 11 years, Amit Jindal is a Performance Lead at Intel's Digital Home Group, enabling high-performance of Intel-powered Smart TVs. Prior to this role, Amit was involved with performance optimization of large-scale enterprise applications (primarily SAP). Amit started his career at Intel in 2000 as an automation engineer developing, simulating, and optimizing performance of automation in Intel factories. Amit has been a threading/ parallelism evangelist since 2005, teaching courses for Intel Academic Program, serving as panelist in academic conferences, and working with Universities in setting their curriculums. Amit holds an MBA Degree in Global Management, and MS Degree in Computer Science.

Choosing a Future Career at Intel Intel's Dani Napier will introduce why Intel is a great place to work-- it's challenging, has great benefits and is abundant with rewarding growth opportunities. She will expand on why parallelism is crucial to Intel's growth strategy and give an overview of the various types of jobs in which knowledge of parallel and distributed processing apply at Intel. Finally, Dani will explain the new hire development process and why Intel is the company that will help you become successful in your desired career path. Lauren Dankiewicz will discuss the recruiting process and how to approach finding a job that is the right fit for you!

Hi, there! My name is Dani. I've been with Intel for almost 14 years, mostly in Chandler, Arizona. I started out as an intern in New Mexico's fabs. Then I was hired into a full-time job and have held a variety of engineering and business roles ever since. When I first started as an Intel engineer I wished I had done three things: 1) I wish I would've taken a couple of business courses 2) I wish I would've taken more stats courses, and 3) I wish I would've learned to give presentations more effectively. All these things I eventually learned at Intel through all the coursework they have in place for employees. I can tell you that in my entire career I have never stopped learning, either from coursework or from brilliant peers.

Lauren Dankiewicz joined Intel in April 2011 as a Recent College Graduate (RCG). At Intel, she is a marketing manager in the Academic Community. Lauren graduated from University of California, Berkeley in 2009 with a B.A. in Chinese Language (Mandarin) and B.S. in Business Administration. She is now pursuing a Master's degree in Computer Science.

Using Games to Teach Parallelism to Undergraduates- Presentation at the NSF/TCPP Workshop on Parallel and Distributed Computing Education (EduPar-11) The Visual Computing Software Enabling (VCSE) group at Intel has developed some exciting game demos that are ideal for teaching the basic tenets of parallelism, including data and task decomposition, scheduling techniques, and software architecture. These demos are designed for an audience ranging from 2nd to 4th year, while retaining the emphasis on hands-on, laboratory instruction. Intel’s faculty collaborators have liked this approach, as today’s students are familiar with multi-media and rich visualization, and games act as immediately likable and interesting delivery vehicles for learning these important parallelism concepts. We have two primary objectives: update undergraduate curriculum with a laboratory-based 2nd year course on parallel computation, and introduce some of the parallelism concepts and profiling tools used in the industry. This approach will help students adopt a “think parallel” mentality early and to see the importance of using profiling tools to develop correct and high-performance code for greater effectiveness. Further, we will share methodologies that improve student understanding of the basic principles of parallel computing.

Deepak Vembar is an Engineer at Intel where he focuses on developing and optimizing graphics and game technologies on Intel hardware. Prior to joining Intel, Deepak was a graduate student at Clemson University and received his Master's and PhD degrees in Computer Science.

An Intel veteran of 11 years, Amit Jindal is a Performance Lead at Intel's Digital Home Group, enabling high-performance of Intel-powered Smart TVs. Prior to this role, Amit was involved with performance optimization of large-scale enterprise applications (primarily SAP). Amit started his career at Intel in 2000 as an automation engineer developing, simulating, and optimizing performance of automation in Intel factories. Amit has been a threading/ parallelism evangelist since 2005, teaching courses for Intel Academic Program, serving as panelist in academic conferences, and working with Universities in setting their curriculums. Amit holds an MBA Degree in Global Management, and MS Degree in Computer Science.

Intel Academic Community at SIGCSE 2010.

Intel Academic Community was at SIGCSE 2010 in Milwaukee, Wisconsin on March 10-13, 2010. Dr. Michael Wrinn did the keynote address on Saturday, March 13, 2010:

 Here are some pictures of the Intel Booth at SIGCSE 2009:

Intel @ SIGCSE 2010 blogs:

• Subscribe to the Intel Academic Community blog RSS feed

Intel Academic Community Black Belts at SIGCSE 2010:

• Matthew Wolf, Georgia Tech University (Dr. Wolf's blog)
• Tom Murphy, Contra Costa College (Dr. Murphy's blog, @wolfmurphy on Twitter)

Can 15 technical high school students solve complex parallel programming challenges, typically reserved for advanced university courses? A three-day boot-camp hosted by the Intel® Academic Community and the Brooklyn Technical High School with industry experts and executives will put top programming students in New York City to the challenge through real-life experiences and interactive exercises.  32-core server technology will be provided by IBM and networking by BLADE Network Technologies.

Jeffrey M. Birnbaum, Managing Director, Global Head of Platform Solutions at Bank of America, has spent a considerable time exploring and implementing lock-free and parallel programming techniques for low latency high throughput messaging systems used in financial services applications, and knows there are not enough skilled programmers to meet industry demand. As a participant on the US Council on Competitiveness High Performance Computing Initiative, he noted the U.S. is falling behind in computer programming education, impacting U.S. competitiveness in the technology sector. Upon reading Threading Building Blocks by James Reinders, the idea of developers needing to change their mental approach to ‘think parallel’ resonated with Jeffrey. Shortly thereafter, he met with a talented high school student interested in software development who took an immediate interest to parallel programming concepts. From this, Jeffrey had the idea to introduce complex parallel programming techniques  -- typically reserved for advanced college or graduate coursework -- to high school students.

"If students start thinking parallel when they are first introduced to software development, it opens the door to new creative solutions that more experienced programmers might not attempt. In essence, the student minds have not been spoiled by old serial programming methodologies and experimentation when multi-core multi-socket systems did not exist," says Mr. Birnbaum.  “We are at the beginning of a new age in programming where the exploitation of advanced multi socket multicore systems to solve new and interesting problems requires developers who combine a "think parallel" mindset with the skill to execute."

Parallel processing is the simultaneous execution of the same task (split up and specially adapted) on multiple processors in order to obtain faster results. The parallel nature can come from a single machine with multiple processors or multiple machines connected together to form a cluster. Intel, IBM and BLADE have teamed up to demonstrate the power of parallel processing through single computers with multiple processors – or cores.  Parallel processing is used in a wide variety of applications, including space exploration, calculating business risk, molecular modeling, weather forecasting, galaxy modeling, oil and gas operations, evaluating financial derivatives, designing wireless networks, and in games.

Mr. Birnbaum asked Intel for help in implementing his vision.

Bob Chesebrough, Senior Course Architect with the Intel Academic Community built a collaborative team, with Jeffrey M. Birnbaum, and Randy Asher, Principal of the Brooklyn Technical High School and Vice President of the National Consortium for Specialized Secondary Schools of Math, Science & Technology to implement the clubhouse with top technical high school students in New York.

The 3-day boot-camp kicks off with interactive exercises using real world experiences (such as standing in lines at a store) to introduce students to parallel programming concepts including race conditions and for loops (see video guide to these challenges). Each day, students will also be given a Parallel Programming Puzzle to ponder, and discuss a real-world software developer solution the following day.

Instruction for the boot camp is being provided by Intel engineers and executives, using the latest software development tools, including Intel® Parallel Studio; and concludes with Jeffrey M. Birnbaum presenting on advanced lock-free programming techniques showcasing database applications running on a 32-core server system on loan from IBM, with high-performance Ethernet connectivity provided by BLADE Network Technologies. BLADE is hosting the servers in its world-class data center networking lab in Silicon Valley.

The curriculum is adapted from undergraduate and graduate materials created by the Intel Academic Community currently being implemented by professors at 1350 universities in 72 countries. This is the first time the curriculum has been adapted to the high school level.

“The coursework for this bootcamp is very challenging. We are giving the students exposure to real industry challenges, to plant the seed on how to approach programming in the future,” says Jeffrey M. Birnbaum.

Today’s high performance desktop computers are empowering a new generation of developers to employ parallel processing to solve complex problems without the need for multi-million dollar supercomputers or having to divide tasks across PC clusters. The confluence of lower cost, high performance computers and networks is a paradigm change in parallel processing engineering.

Fifteen students were hand selected by Randy Asher, Principal of the Brooklyn Technical High School -- the largest technical high School in the US -- based on the student's software programming focus and high achievement at the school. An additional student from Hunter Science High School will participate, as well as 6 selected teachers.

"There is a high level of enthusiasm and excitement from students who are participating in the Clubhouse. They are hungry for this type of training to give them a competitive advantage over their peers and a jump start at new programming techniques and developer tools. Our hope is these students will challenge university professors and old software development methodologies by developing scalable coding techniques and breakthrough parallel patterns," says Randy Asher.

• Intel in Education: http://intel.com/thinkparallel
• Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/intelsoftwarenetwork or http://bit.ly/ISNonFB
• Twitter:  @intelsoftware, @intelevents and @intelswblog
• YouTube: http://www.youtube.com/user/intelswnetwork
• Intel Software Network TV:  http://www.intel.com/software/tv or http://bit.ly/isntv
• Academic Videos: http://software.intel.com/en-us/videos/category/academic/1/1/
• Intel Academic Community: http://intel.com/software/academic
• Intel Parallel Programming & Multicore Community: http://intel.com/software/multicore

LINKS:

• Blade Network Technologies: http://www.bladenetwork.net
• Brooklyn Technical High School: http://www.bths.edu
• IBM: http://www.ibm.com
• Intel Academic Community: http://www.intel.com/thinkparallel
• National Consortium for Specialized Secondary Schools of Math, Science and Technology: http://www.ncsssmst.org/
• US Council on Competitiveness, High Performance Initiative: http://www.compete.org/about-us/initiatives/hpc

• Intel Smoke Demo: http://software.intel.com/en-us/articles/smoke-game-technology-demo
• Intel Thread Like Wildfire Contest: http://www.intel.com/software/thread-like-wildfire
• Intel® Parallel Studio: http://software.intel.com/en-us/intel-parallel-studio-home/
• Networking for High Performance Computing (HPC): http://www.bladenetwork.net/hpc

Orion Granatir is a senior engineer with Intel’s Visual Computing Software Division. He is the Technical Lead on the Intel Smoke Game Technology demo project.

Prior to joining Intel in 2007, Orion worked on several PlayStation 3 titles as a senior programmer with Insomniac Games. His most recent published titles are Resistance: Fall of Man, and Ratchet and Clank Future: Tools of Destruction.

Read Orion's Intel Software Network blogs.