Teach Parallel at IDF 2009, San Francisco

Dr. John Gustafson, Intel Research

The Intel Developer Forum (IDF) this year saw a number of changes of interest to Academic Community. In recent memory, IDF was almost entirely a hardware event. That is no longer the case- there is an increasing focus on software andthousands of software developers attended IDF in San Francisco this year.

In like manner, the focus on the event as a venue for academia is also increasing. IDF 2009 saw a rich set of classes and labs targeted for academics. We held a well-attended academic poster session and a panel on "What Parallel Computing R&D Brings to University Education" led by Intel Black Belts Professor Tom Murpy and Dr. Matthew Wolf as well as Dr. John Gustafson and Dr. Michael Wrinn.

Andrew Chien, Vice president of Intel research gave a talk on Academia and Industry - A Close partnership.

I was proud and happy to note that our CEO, Paul Otellini, specifically called out the Academic Community during his keynote, mentioning especially the wide number and variety of universities affiliated with our worldwide community.

Paul Steinberg
Intel Academic Community Manager

Dr. Justin Rattner, Intel CTO, Corporate Vice president & Director of Intel Labs

Intel CTO, Dr. Justin Rattner spoke to Teach parallel about Teraflop computing and exascale technology as well as the importance of introducing parallelism early in the undergraduate curriculum. Dr. Rattner advocates makeing parallelism the programming baseline while sequential programming becomes the special case.

Andrew A. Chien, Vice president Intel Labs, Director, Future Technologies Research

Andrew talks about his transition from professor at MIT to Director of Research and "way out" technologies at Intel.
Among topics Andrew discusses are: Heterogeneous computing & the challenges this will bring to software education and industry.

One of the intriguing ideas that Andrew brings up is that new architectures will force software designers to understand human beings alot better if they are to design systems that work. According to Andrew, this human factor will take us far beyond the GUI, demanding knowledge of fields from ergonomics to psychology and anthropology. Hear more about these ideas as well as Andrew's thoughts on the coming importance of statistics and security to both academicia and industry.

Intel's Academic Black Belts, Professor Tom Murphy of Contra Costa College and Dr. Matthew Wolf of Georgia Tech

Intel's first Academic Black Belts, Professor Tom Murphy of Contra Costa College and Dr. Matthew Wolf of Georgia tech, speak about their research and teaching as well as their thoughts on the importanc of parallelism to the undergraduate curriculum.

Parviz Peiravi, Principal Architect, Intel Enterprise Sales Group

Parviz talks about the evolution of cloud computing, the importance of virtualization for the realization of the cloud vision. He also talks about the needs for the computer Science undergraduate curriculum about the usage models for technologies, how and when they are used. Hear more of this interesting interview here.

Dr. Anwar Ghuloum, Product Manager, Intel CT Technologies

Anwar talks about how Intel CT can help in data parallelism tasks, especially when working with large collections and image processing.
Anwar talks about the critical need for portable tools oriented towards differing programming models and different developer needs as well as the importance of applying tools like CT early in the development cycle, "If you are doing high level programming, you should be closer to performance than you are today."
He also talks about the importance of driving CT, and many new programming models, tools and APIs, into the undergraduate curriculum in order to create a toolbox for those teaching (and learning) about parallelism.

Dr. Jose Luis Elvira, Professor, Instituto Tecnolgico de Estudio Superiores de Occidente

Professor Elvira speaks with Tom and Paul about how parallelism was succesfully incorpated into the undergraduate computer and computational sciences at his university.

Andrew "Fitz" Fitzgibbon, Recent Graduate, Earlham College
Tom and Paul speak with Andrew "Fitz" Fitzgibbon, recent graduate, Earlham college. Fitz talks both of his experience learning parallelism at Earlham, teaching professors as part of Supercomputing Education as well as his thoughts on how parallelism can be woven into the curriculum. The converation also touches upon virtual worlds and metaverse simulations as well as his current job search ;-)

Tariq Saif, Student, Contra Costa College, Winner, Intel IDF 2009 Coding Challenge

Last, but certainly not least, Tom and Paul speak with Tariq Saif, whiz kid coder and student of Professor Murphy. Tom looks justifiably proud of his student who has just won the Intel IDF 2009 Coding challenge, beating his nearest competitor by over 4 seconds in the optimization challenge.