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Spreading the Word in Romainia
By Peter Hinsbeeck (Intel) (4 posts) on October 26, 2009 at 1:46 am
Teaching a class is a real pleasure when the participants are all fully engaged in the subject matter. Such was the case ealier this month when we assembled faculty members from University Polytechnica Bucharest (PUB), as well as 5 other universities around Romania to review our course materials on parallel programming. The event began with PUB faculty presenting an introduction to parallel programming and OpenMP followed by my colleague Nick Popovici and me presenting more advanced lessons covering OpenMP 3.0, using Intel’s Parallel Studio to find and correct threading errors and tune for performance as well as almost a full day on Intel Threading Building Blocks. Most of the participants had significant background in parallel programming. Some were already teaching it in their classes. It was clear that they were all attentively following the presentations, often asking exactly the right questions to motivate the topic transitions in the material. Someone joked that we had paid some of them to ask specific questions just to make us look good.
Half way through the second day we ran into a minor problem with one of the lab exercises that is supposed to demonstrate load imbalance. We had accidently installed the solution file in place of the problem code on the participant’s machines. After giving them a few minutes to play with the lab exercise, I attempted to “demonstrate” the problem to the class using Intel’s Parallel Amplifier. To my surprise there was no evidence of a problem at all. While I was busily checking the project settings to make sure the tool was gathering data correctly, it became clear to me just how smart these folks really are. One of the “students” interrupted me to suggest how removing the OpenMP schedule clause in the code would cause an interesting load imbalance and make for a more interesting lab exercise. All the while he was explaining it, the rest of the participants were grinning and nodding in agreement. Rather than an embarrassing mistake on our part, I should have sold it as a “curriculum development” exercise.
The purpose of this event was to review our course materials with the faculty so they could “scale out” the training to other universities in Romania. From what I saw last week, I’d say these folks are ready to take this show on the road.
Categories: Academic, Parallel Programming
For more complete information about compiler optimizations, see our Optimization Notice.
Emil Slusanschi
35
We therefore decided to go forth and "spread the word" and the fallout of this event to date stands as follows: we went to four other Universities and had one-day classes with a total of 68 students from these centers, at both undergraduate and graduate levels. More precisely, we went to the Computer Science Departments of the Universities of Craiova, "Dunarea de Jos" of Galati, and "Transilvania" of Brasov as well as the Mathematics and Informatics Department of the University of Bucharest. We covered introductory the OpenMP materials you presented to us, as well as the usage of the Intel Parallel Studio tools. There were also practical demonstrations for these lectures, on some i7-notebooks kindly provided to us by Intel Romania. All in all I would call the action a success, quite a number of the participants manifesting their interests in the presented subjects. I must also thank you for the offer to provide the participants to these trainings with free software licenses for the presented software.
To finish, we plan to repeat these training with students from other Universities in the country, like Sibiu, Cluj-Napoca, or Timisoara, in the first quarter of 2010, and would also love to have more trainings delivered by you, in the coming years, on new advanced software and programming technologies. Some of the materials presented were already part of our curricula, in one form of another, and some of the things you should us, made or will make their way into our lectures and labs. Therefore, thanks a lot and we look forward to future collaborations.