Talented kids & multi-core: Adding fuel to the mix

By Robert Chesebrough (Intel) (8 posts) on July 17, 2009 at 9:58 pm

Now I can add orchestra leader to my list of job roles at Intel. I’ve been conducting an ensemble of talented players from across industry, education and within Intel to orchestrate the first High School Parallelism Boot-camp. I’ve been crafting the flow of topics & lab activities, developing some new ways to convey parallelism topics using role play, coordinating with luminaries & Intel engineers. I’ve been rounding up & testing content & systems for months now. Now all that work is about to pay off next week in the first ever (as far as I know) High School Parallelism boot-camp hosted at Brooklyn Technical High School and sponsored by Intel, Bank of America, Blade Network & IBM.

Warning - new metaphor coming…

We are about to embark on a journey. A journey to the future. A future defined by the many-core era.

To take us on the journey – we need fuel. The fuel mix for this journey consists of four ingredients: multi-core hardware, parallelism training, great instructors and the fertile minds of bright high school students. We are about to light the mix off in a controlled burn next week (July 21-23) at the campus of Brooklyn Tech HS. A couple dozen HS students and faculty will participate in this hands-on parallel programming training event. We will be laying out the challenge to begin thinking in parallel and arming the students with three patterns that can be used to think about parallel problems. Then we will arm them with a couple of methods to implement parallel software on many-core HW. We will discuss some of the challenges unique to parallel programming and ways to address these challenges using SW tools & new ways of thinking. Then we will show them just of few of the possibilities – a few compelling SW demos that show how “real” a virtual world powered by multi-core systems can be. Along the way we hope to arm them knowledge of how to leverage many-core systems that are headed our way. Hopefully we will refine our mixture as we learn from these students & faculty how to better equip young minds.

I guess I want to extend James Reinder’s point and say that today high schools & colleges are either teaching “the history of programming” or they are teaching parallel programming. I am excited to work with Brooklyn Technical High school and their principal, Randy Asher, who are doing something about teaching to the FUTURE.  I am also proud to work with folks like Jeff Birnbaum (Bank of America) who was the inspiration & prime motivation for making this project happen.

Stand back, put your safety goggles on – we’re about to light the mixture.

Categories: Academic, Gaming, Parallel Programming, Software Engineering, Threading Building Blocks

Comments (3)

July 18, 2009 11:51 PM PDT

jmbnyc@gmail.com
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 Bob,
Looking forward to putting on my goggles, teaching, learning and getting to help influence the future.
July 20, 2009 10:39 AM PDT

Amy Barton (Intel)
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 More on this story - just posted: Are High School Whiz Kids Ready to "Think Parallel?"

http://software.intel.com/en-us/articles/clubhouse-parallel-universe/
July 24, 2009 10:14 AM PDT

igturner
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 I attended the Parallelism Boot Camp these past three days and I think the program was a success. As a teacher, I saw a few things that could have worked better but on the whole the material was exactly what I expected and pertinent from top to bottom. There are a few very important issues that you guys are going to have to address if you want to continue to bring this to the High Schools. I'll try to be brief.

At the top of the list is the "language barrier". Since College Board decided that the AP Computer Science exam is to be given in Java instead of C++, very few high schools will actually offer a class in C++. That conflicts heavily with what you're trying to present. The concepts can certainly be presented in a Java class (and I understand there are packages in Java that allow students to practice those concepts) but students attending the boot camp will be unfamiliar with the code. The presentation regarding the queue was most especially difficult for students of Java because the bulk of it was a presentation of a C++ project. I don't know what you can do on your end to synchronize the workshop with what's taught in the high schools (I think it's very unlikely that College Board will switch the test back to C++). At the very least, with parallelism on the verge of becoming the norm in programming, College Board should inject it into the curriculum for AP Computer Science. That might be something Intel could support on their end.

Ivan Turner
Teacher
Brooklyn Technical High School

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