To tell you the truth, I never expected to be involved with forming computer clubs, since the only club I'd ever willingly joined was the Columbia Record Club. Looking back it makes perfect sense, which I suppose why I am writing this blog entry to advocate you considering to do the same.

I'll tell you how I got here. Two years ago I decided to tackle head-on students' frequent first question to me being "When can I learn how to program video games." To do so effectively requires the equivalent of a BS in computer science, hence my suggesting students take my series of courses. I decided to recruit some questing students to form what became the "Contra Costa College Graphics and Gaming Guild" (C3G3). Over the last couple of yeas they used several game engines, several modeling programs, and several bit graphics programs. What surprised me was that the guild attracted a wide variety of students, including several very talented artists. They taught themselves; trained each other. I learned that a club, with no grades associated, allowed students a unique opportunity to freely explore with guidance from me as advisor.

Paul Steinberg and I film the "Teach Parallel" interviews, Paul from the Intel Hillsboro studio in Portland, and me from either my Intro to C++ course in the Fall, or my Data Structures course in the Spring. It motivated students to request a Parallel Programming Club, where again students began exploring topics in an ungraded, self-driven way outside of formal classes. The two clubs had some overlap in membership, but were largely different. If you'd asked me before they'd come to be, I'd have said there could be no justification for two CS clubs; one would suffice. I was delighted with where the club went. We received over twenty Lenovo laptops to explore Meego, and explore we did, and explore we continue to do with Meego morphing into Tizon and HTML5. We have a cool app in the works, which may find its niche among all the other apps contending for use and 15 minutes of fame. They are also collaborating with Leo Ferres' students in the University of Concepcion in Chile to solve an extended Project Euler Problem 4 on palindromic integers. The students are currently working independently, using the Intel Manycore machine for poduction runs. One representative from each school will be on Teach Parallel, to discuss progress, and then the students will collaborate together. Paul and I hope to extend his idea with more problems and more schools.

I have been goading my students for years to solve more Project Euler problems collectively than I have. These problems require a knowledge of mathematics and computer science, with sufficient algorithmic experience wisdom to craft a solution. I know they will beat me, but I am trying to set as high a bar as possible. One student took up the charge, and formed a Computational Math Club to do just this. It is delightful to be advisor to a group of students striving to beat my record. It encapsulates exactly what delights me about teaching, to help train people to better academically and professionally than I am. Several of these students are also collaborating with the Parallel Programming Club on the Chile problem. Once again I am amazed that there could be 3 separate groups of students all working on distinct aspects of Computer Science.

This brings us full circle back to the Sisterhood of CS that formed last weekend primarily by the five young women in my intro to CS course, along with a couple of motivated graduates of my classes. The current plan is to bring in guest speakers, develop mutual support structures, educate me on what I need to do to better support young women in CS, and develop some applications in the ScienceSim based metaverse. We met today for the first time today, Saturday Oct 6 at 2pm in Second Life, because that was the only time we could meet around school and work schedules. I was wearing some black wings from a company long out of existence in Second Life; both students wanted to learn how to make their own. Yessssssss! Daedalus would be pleased with their sincerity, for they will certainly not be using wax. May they fly high.

New avatar

I did say we have five clubs. I was adopted by the Anime Club who needed an advisor. The president of the club is a former student who competed in both SC Education and TeraGrid programming contests. It will be interesting to see if a project involving all five clubs emerges.

I am sometimes exhausted by the success of these clubs, but the dynamism and life of these club comes right back and infuses the classroom. All of a sudden some students are seeing a larger context for what we are doing in class. It is no longer just academic for them. The academics and academic challenges are being embraced with eyes more open to possibilities: a self-induced wake-up call. Students not in the clubs are also positively affected, as to be expected, by the other students in the room. It is a wonderful experiment in learning. Stay tuned for more as the story unfolds.

Matt and I both teach the notion of graceful degradation in our software engineering courses. The creators of hardware and software will ensure that their planned functionality is present. Graceful enhancement means unanticipated desires somehow are possible. To me, Scheme is a language that best lends itself to graceful enhancement, especially since the bulk of the language is implemented in terms of itself. There is little to Scheme outside of lambda expressions.

We started talking about this as a result of longing for features in a chip with 40+ cores. Matt and I wanted to different theings. He wanted low level middleware/compiler hooks. I wanted low level user level hooks. We both agreed that having the hardware do the the bulk of the heavy lifting for the general useful is a very good thing. A system with Graceful Enhancement will support those special cases where tools and/or users want to exert control of something like of data among cores.

Math Flyer is the first part of Interactivate to make its way from the web to the iPod. I hope many more wend their way in a similar fashion. Shodor's Interactivate is a wonderful collection of teaching/learning resources that have been delivering on computational reasoning for years and years, helping to build the kind of mathematical intuition essential effective problem solving. I had the good fortune to accompany Bob Panoff, president of Shodor, to the Navajo Nation's capital of Window Rock to present a workshop on Interactivate. Although I am usually focused on parallel and distributed programming, it was great to see how elementary school teachers got so excited about the free tools on the web.

I am looking forward to introducing my grandkids to Math Flyer when they get just a bit past second grade. Useful tools help learning. Stay tuned for more on algorithmic patterns

We are at a cusp where there is a great amount of productive churn surrounding how and what to teach in order that our CS graduates are competent in the now ubiquitous parallel computational world.

It would be great to tap the wisdom of the readers of these Intel blogs, and so, please consider looking over the call for submission I duplicate below. Please consider contributing your knowledge and experiences to this special issue.

Call for Submissions for a Special Issue of
ACM Transactions on Computing Education on
Concurrent, Parallel and Distributed Computation

 

The past few years have seen a significant change in the computer architecture that is readily available to students and educators: for example, multicore processors and cloud computing. Furthermore, programming languages used for teaching have multithreading defined within the language. Even visual programming environments for young people like Scratch and Alice support concurrency.

 

The editors of this Special Issue are looking for papers describing innovative approaches to teaching and learning this subject. Preference will be given to papers that include an empirical evaluation.

 

A preliminary one-page abstract of the paper should be sent to the editors of the Special Issue by 1 October 2011. The editors will assess the relevance of the papers for the Special Issue by 15 October. The deadline for submission of full papers is 1 December 2011.

 

Submissions must be done via Manuscript Central (http://mc.manuscriptcentral.com/toce). In the cover letter, indicate that the paper is for the Special Issue on Concurrent, Parallel and Distributed Computation. See the TOCE review criteria at see http://toce.acm.org/authors.html).

 

Guest editors:

Moti Ben-Ari, Weizmann Institute of Science, moti.ben-ari@weizmann.ac.il

Dan Garcia, University of California Berkeley, ddgarcia@cs.berkeley.edu

Tom Murphy, Contra Costa College, tmurphy@contracosta.edu

The NCSI (National Computational Science Institute) gang of four, Paul Gray, Dave Joiner, Charlie Peck and myself, came up with the idea of ACME (A Computational Mobile Environment) in 2007. I previously wrote about in a prior blog post in 2009. A next 2011 version, a first version for a new, wider audience, is in the process of being birthed this summer. The hardware is still LittleFe, though more robust and fully featured. The software is still BCCD (Bootable Cluster CD, aka Bootable Compute Cluster Distribution), though also more robust and fully featured. The curricular component will still be pointed to by CSERD, though more robust and fully featured, and integrated into the BCCD.

LittleFe is a reference design for a portable computational cluster that is low cost at under $3K; easily transportable, since it comes packaged in a Pelican case with built in wheels); and fully featured (6 dual-core Intel Atom based boards, each with a nVidia chipset. This provides the three major kinds of parallel hardware in use today: shared memory cores, distributed memory on system boards, and general purpose graphical processing unit. Thanks to support from EAPF.org, Intel and the SC Steering committee, this summer we will have 25 LittleFe kits assembled, some at the Oklahoma University Advanced Parallel and Distributed workshop at the end July, and the rest at the SC11 conference in November. If you choose to purchase your own kit of parts, by summer we will have a training video to guide successful assembly of the kit of parts, deployment of the BCCD distro on what was assembled, and running curricular examples on the deployed software. Using footage from the two build outs, we will also make a video describing and motivating use of the system, which will help prying loose the $3k to purchase a kit of parts. There is still time to get in on the free LittleFe by applying at LittleFe.net. Well, actually its not free, you have to have a realistic plan to create or port curricula onto the LittleFe platform and then carry out the plan.

The BCCD is a live CD that can actually transform a windows lab into a fully featured computational cluster in under 5 minutes and restore it to a Windows lab in even less time. We use the same ISO to deploy software on LittleFe so faculty/students using either version will have the same user interface and experience. The BCCD distro is available at BCCD.net

Computational Science Education Reference Desk (CSERD) , part of the National Science Digital Library (NSDL), points to verified, validated and accredited curricula developed by others. In reality, we hope there that many of the sites identifying exemplars will point to the BCCD, both as a love cluster CD, but also as a repository of vetted curricula working with the BCCD distro. We are stabilizing and expanding our version of the curricula as a foundation for the work done by the 25 LittleFe recipients that will commence this summer.

Another piece of the puzzle are the (National Computational Science Institute)NCSI summer workshops that are available for faculty from a wide variety of disciplines. They are extraordinary. Paul Steinberg and I interviewed Dave Valentine today who raved about it during the interview. I attended the first NCSI Parallel and Distributed workshop in 2003 and began helping teach them in 2004 (with Paul Grey and Dave and Charlie, oh my!).

You might think I just tied PEA (Parallel Educational Appliance) to "Once Upon A Mattress" to prompt you to reminisce about Carol Burnett's standout originating portrayal of Princess Winnifred, but in reality, it is the original Arabic definition of the word mattress that is at play. A mattress was a convergent breakthrough early in the last millennia, where cushions were thrown on the ground to be a foundation for sleep. A foundation. That is what this is all about. Our classrooms might some times be a place where students come to sleep, but having a solid engaging easily deployed parallel computational environment will go a long way in transforming sleepy lethargy into active engagement.

And yeah, talking with enthusiastic Dan convinced inspired me to develop a parallel class at my college.

Little did I know that the language to which he was gravitating was going to be so doggone fun and appropriate.

A few years ago at SIGCSE (ACM's Special Interest Group for Computer Science Education), Dan took me to Alice's Tea Party, reintroducing me to the latest generation of Alice(from CMU). It was then Dan also told me about Scratch (from MIT) and that he thought it would be the language he was going to use for the CS for non-majors course at UC Berkeley.

Fast forward two years to last month's SIGCSE, where Dan and Brian Harvey were both enthusiastically talking about BYOB (Build Your Own Blocks) http://byob.berkeley.edu/, which became the language for the "Joy and Beauty" CS intro for non-majors that Dan is currently teaching. Not only did we interview Dan, we also interviewed Brian about these very topics. Brian and Jens Mönig extended Scratch to have "No Ceiling". Scratch is an amazingly powerful visual programming language allowing your average 10 year old to make wildly powerful and expressive programs . They have extended it to have features needed for a Berkeley CS class. Brian Harvey has been my Scheme hero for some time. I came kicking and screaming into teaching LISP at my college when I was first hired. I quickly realized that the "Structure and Interpretation of Computer Language" is simultaneously the world's best textbook, one of the world's hardest textbooks to absorb. I also realized I really like DrScheme (now DrRacket) as my interpreter of choice since it was freely available on all platforms, and its IDE smoothly relieved users of the tedium of reformatting code and tracking stray parenthesis. The extensions Brian introduced to Scratch are Scheme inspired. In a nutshell, every language element should be first class, in other words you can do anything in the language with them. For functions, this means having unnamed procedures you can pass to a function and possibly return from a function. What this means to me is that the ability to think in Scheme is directly informing how I think in BYOB. Thank you Brian.

Jens did something wildly delightfully unexpected to me. He reimplemented Scratch (in Smalltalk), using a similar drag and drop paradigm. Wow. And he exposes this in BYOB so you can edit a block in the Elements editor and by saving it, recompile it into an available block in BYOB. I always wanted a reason to learn Smalltalk and now in my grasp I have YASP (yet another summer project.) BYOB looks to be one of the most elegantly extensible programming environments I have seen, with the added benefit that programs become art. I have always taught students that the flow of code should be elegant, but now there is a multicolored flow that further aids progress towards a mathematically elegant algorithm.

You may be wondering why I am lavishing praise on what might not appear to be a hard-core parallel programming language. Well in sense it is. The essence of Scratch/BYOB is having sprites collaborating on the screen by cooperating concurrently. I am still a BYOB noob, having set myself the goal of reimplementing the classic Asteroids game in BYOB as a project uniquely suited to BYOB I can't as easily program in the other languages I own. I have barely scratched the surface of the language, but I can already see support for threads, shared variables and local variables. Scratch/BYOB also has a mesh mode for running across a network. I am pleased to have found the active BYOB version 3 forum.

The acronym, BYOB, apparently has another meaning, not popular in some circles, which is leading the development team to a more neutral choice. I hear Snap is a likely candidate.

My initial urge was to lament the struggle in retaining and reaching Black males in Computer Science. My friend Byron Robertson is getting his PhD on this very topic. Paul and I interviewed Byron at SC10 last November, but it was a series of private conversations we had that significantly affected my relationship with all my students. I had discovered on my own that being a passionate teacher is a key element. Heck that is about all I have, coupled with a moderate amount of knowledge and experience, and huge doses of the luck in being in the right place at the right time.

An essential factor, new to me, is to link classroom concepts to a student's previous analogous knowledge and experience. This is something I learned to do for myself along the way, which then became an unconscious skill. Byron helped me understand this is far from a universal skill, instead a barrier for many, stopping their learning cold.

I know it helps students to see possible jobs out there, as well as to see the link between course content and these academic and industry possibilities. What I didn't get was to help individual students see how a sequence of career steps is entirely possible and practical for them. I realize this is perhaps one of the most significant and subtle examples of the digital divide; a divide in the ease at which you can envision yourself as a successful computer professional.

These factors directly affected the Parallel Programming Club field trip I led to NERSC in Oakland; a trip we took just before this semester started. I could see how significant it was to talk specifics for over two hours with folks from NERSC. Kudos to NERSCs Jon Bashor for arranging it all, and feeding us some really good pizza. We even got our picture taken in front of Hopper, the fifth fastest computer in the world.

Jeff Duncan-Andrade from the Raza Studies department at SF State, who also teaches a high school class, as well as a high school advisory every morning, recently turned me on to a book of poetry, "The Rose That Grew From Concrete" by Tupac Shakur. Jeff pointed out that the rose growing in concrete, stilted in height with deformed petals, deserves not focus on its lack and why it grew, but instead appreciation and understanding how it grew. A lot of Jeff's students, and my students, cross gang lines on a series of busses to get to school each day. Jeff helped me see the courage and great energy it often takes for students to just get to the school entrance.

This makes me think of my student of mine who I first met last semester when he took two classes from me. He was one of the many students Intel graciously supported in accompanying me to last September's IDF. He learned voraciously and diligently last semester, but still ended up failing both the classes he took. He is also one of the students working on designing and assembling the portable cluster in an attache case: an ungraded project we do outside of any class. He is back taking two classes from me this semester, and is even more focused. He is one of many students who came out of Richmond who will hopefully succeed with filling in knowledge gaps and growing in skills as a successful student. I am better armed to help him and others on their journey.

Thanks Byron and Jeff for helping me be a more effective teacher, advocate, and coach.

The title mentions a half empty cup. I would be remiss in failing to mention that I am seeing greatly increased success among Black males in my classes. One student transferred to Georgia Tech at the end of last semester; another who also happened to start last semester, was the catalyst for starting the Parallel Programming Club and is project lead on our multi-platform rewrite and extension of WiiMote based whiteboards. Successes small and large fuel the dreams leading to more successes. I am delighted to be part of helping students write a new history for themselves.

These things peacefully and purposely fill me this first day of Black History month.

These were Ernest Shackleton's words advertising for crew to accompany him on his adventure to the South Pole. If we substituted "men and women" for "men", we might be talking about the sometimes process of being a teacher. It resonates with my recent weeks with "the laptop" project, which I just got word from Guinness as a new record category: "Most powerful portable computer". The target is 30 min battery with an overall weight under 10 kilograms.

Intel graciously allowed me to substitute two newly released quad core Xeon chips for the customary gift of a laptop for newly minted blackbelts, allowing me to move a pet project from the back burner to center stage. For some time I wanted to repackage our LIttleFe portable cluster idea into an aluminum attache case: LittleAl.

Instead of "Intel allowed", it is far more important to say "Zander Sprague of the blackbelt program has championed" getting me needed equipment. Zander's accomplishments are going to sound something like the 12 days of Christmas: 12 sticks of memory, four motherboards, two blade cases, two more Xeon chips, and a terabyte SATA hard drive. Even more important, Zander has repeatedly traveled to the college to work with my students in assembling LittleAl. This involved noticing the theory of the motherboard and the chip being compatible is not the same as the practice of the motherboard and the chip being compatible.

After tediously, and rigorously, swapping the various combinations of chips, motherboards, various sizes and ranks of memory, blade cases, and monitors; we came to the conclusion we were stumped by the beep codes and the motherboard error lights did not reveal why we could not power-on to the BIOS. A late night conference call with Zander, myself, and Jun, a very helpful board designer from Intel Shanghai, led to the missing link; we needed to get one of the original chips for which the board was designed, from which we could power-up to BIOS, allowing us to re-flash the BIOS, coaxing the new chip to be in electronic communion with the motherboard. Sweet. Along the way, we diagnosed one out of the four motherboards was bad, which Zander also transformed into a working one, not unlike the way Harry Potter would have, aside from the fact no wand or magic was involved, it took days rather than seconds, and Zander does not have a lightning scar on his forehead (his is a ouroboros.)

I need to mention that somewhere along the way I started channeling my hero Don Quixote in tilting at windmills. I realized that if I could shoe-horn into the case: a keyboard, mouse, screen, and battery; well then, I'd have a laptop. But this enabled me to see the windmill behind it; given these changes I would clearly have the world's most powerful laptop. This revealed the grandest one of all: a Guinness Book of World's Record.

This takes us to today, the day after which I should have marched forth to write this blog. Today is the Friday before the Wednesday when I head to SIGCSE, where I planned to establish the world record. "Safe return doubtful" is certainly a valid way to see describe things. A number of difficulties have hobbled progress. But this would not be seeing things with Cervantes' eyes. What counts is not the way things appear to be, but the way things are and the way things should and will be.

And this, my friends, is a long way around to the title of this blog. Think globally, but act locally. The global world record is not the goal it is just the eye candy to lead people to what is important: the local actors acting locally. This is mainly my students, who keep appearing out of the woodwork to join the team, a new one surfaced today, but more about Stephen in a paragraph or two. It are also the local businesses who have joined us in the project: Intel, DisplayLink, Tap Plastics, and Orchard Hardware. They are choosing to invest in their community and I am grateful. More important, it is the people of these places that are part of the effort Zander, Ron, Jun, Carl the chip supplier, Jesse the server board supplier, all from Intel; Theo from DisplayLink who provided the coolest small video screen for the monitor; Sophia, Harold, Stephen, and Liam from Tap Plastics who provided mounting equipment and illusion films with minute parabolic lenses (just the thing for "The Effect"); Josh and Toni from Orchard Hardware supplying the mounting hardware.

There is a great pride these local people have in West Contra Costa County which I certainly share. People may hear about the shootings in Richmond, and that very real grief has certainly touched us at our college; but there are also a vast number of caring people building community. I must mention Matt Krupnick from the Contra Costa Times who wrote a resonant piece about our project. Thanks Matt for being another local actor and part of the team.

Stephen is a gamer working at Tap rebuilding financial reserves to go back to his computer science program at nearby UC Berkeley. He is interested in joining the Graphics and Gaming Guild for which I am club advisor. We have just decided to go with the freely available Unreal Engine. Stephen is fascinated with the prospect of devising a game that will only run on this 128 Gig memory 51 GHz (aggregate) processor. He may also take some CS classes from us along the way. Welcome Stephen.

More updates to follow from SIGCSE, when I can work with the Earlham College crew, led by Charlie Peck, to help work at outstanding LittleAl problems.

BTW, the Quixote did not think he was tilting at windmills; he was fighting the giant Briareus with his 100 hands. This LittleAl laptop will have the hostname briarius because it will have 32 hyperthreads and 100's of Gigs. More importantly, it will not represent an idle tilting at world records, it will be a giant catalyst for bringing people together.

I've known for awhile that I could sometimes infect a student; get them working on a problem/project/idea, where they spend lots of time outside of class on this effort. It hadn't occurred to me till today that this notion could be generalized to one student infecting another student.

The culprit catalyst has a two word title: Project Euler.

My beginning C++ students wanted a group project as an end of the year effort. I helped the class self-select into groups of 2-4 students, who collectively would groupwise work through the first 10 project Euler problems, with each student taking the lead on a different problem. Project Euler has 266 simply stated word problems, insidiously requiring a growing mathematical and computer science knowledge and sophistication as the problem numbers increase. I too have ended up infecting myself, setting myself the goal of completing all the problems. I've realized that for the first time in a whole buncha years, I again am working on word problems that are pushing my limits. I love/hate it.

Viral Education is dangerous. Tomorrow, I am turning off all class computers so we can complete our discussion of inheritance, polymorphism, and virtual functions. I was not able to capture focus with any of my standard teaching/theatrical tricks. They know if we can get back on track, I will reward them with Tom Sawyerian delights. What a way to mend and paint educational fences and barriers.

Project Euler is my current best and only recommendation for new and experienced programmers to hone their skills. I have students navigating among C++, Scheme, and pencil/paper to wrest success from the chaos of imprecise reasoning. I am curious what you as a reader think of these problems. As Jimi pondered, "Are you experienced?"

You are hereby invited to a gathering on November 17 at 5:30 pm in room C124 of the Oregon Convention Center in Portland. We are having a panel discussion focused on incorporating parallelism into the Computer Science curriculum. Of course, you might need to purchase a day pass to SC09 to attend, if you are not otherwise attending.

We generally all believe it is a good idea to weave parallelism throughout the CS curriculum. There are a variety of paths to get there, roughly corresponding to number of panelists, of which I will be the moderator and facilitator. The panel held last year at SC08, had a standing-room-only animated crowd. It happens to be available in 15 minute chunks: part 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, and 7. I expect similar festivities this year.

Our distinguished panel is composed of

• Wen-mei Hwu, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, who believes key computer architecture concepts, some performance optimization concepts, some program analysis concepts, some program transformation concepts, effective parallel programming patterns and algorithms, and fundamental parallelism concepts are required to train a successful undergraduate CS major.
• James Larus, Microsoft Research, who believes parallelism must be woven into the general series of courses, but sees the dilemma of the current awkward and crude tools imposing awareness of the underlying architecture on the student. He longs for a more elegant toolchain for use with students.
• Simon McIntosh-Smith, University of Bristol, who has succumbed to the "Snow White" syndrome of advocating the dwarves parallel patterns from UCB. He also sees the utility of teaching the current prevalent tools: MPI and OpenMP, while remaining sensitive to the emerging potential standards: CUDA, OpenCL, Ct, map-reduce, etc.
• Bob Chesebrough, Intel, who sees the trouble in River City of a late introduction of parallelism to students, and of course recommends the "Think Method", in this case the "Think Parallel" method. Parallelism is all around and the key concepts can be conveyed without a computer.
• Steve Parker, nVidia, who believes and has done many things. There needs to be a teaser to get you to come to the event. This is it.
• Charlie Peck, Earlham College, who sees faculty education as key activity to get right, since many CS faculty have limited first hand experience with the myriad faces of parallelism. Involving students is a key part of this, for a unique form of learning takes place via an apprenticeship model of student involvement.

For several years now, we have been a parallel education working group composed of broad representation from industry, colleges/universities, hardware manufactures, and labs We are about to call ourselves something like "The Educational Alliance for a Parallel Future." I now know first hand what is involved in morphing from a working group to an alliance. When you are getting ready to make a tee-shirt, alliance ends up sounding sounding way cooler, and actually better reflects who we are. We will also be releasing a parallel crossword puzzle. This is not one solved in parallel, though it might be if someone is looking over your shoulder. The subject matter is of many things parallel. Stay tuned, we'll point you to it, once it debuts at SC09.

I gave my Computer Architecture midterm yesterday. One of the four problems was to predict the output of a 17 byte program. This is with an assembly language where the bulk of the instructions are three bytes. The correct answer is of course 42, once the unconditional branch is successfully mutated to an untaken conditional branch.

•  
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      C1 00 07 1C E1 00 07 04 00 0E 38 00 2A 00 41 00 0A

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    •  
      lda adj,d
asla
sta adj,d
br skip
adj: .equate 7
msg: .ascii "8\x00*\x00"
skip: stro msg,d
.end

Only 20% of the class got it right, even though I told them days before they would. By the end of the semester they will be more adept. Earlier, I'd given them the project of writing a solution to the Tower of Hanoi problem in assembly language. A student challenged me to write it in under 100 bytes. My current version is 76 bytes and I see how to prune it down to 71 bytes.

The most bloated document editor on my computer is expressed in 27.6 megabytes, and while it is doing a lot more than the Tower of Hanoi problem, it is certainly not doing six orders of magnitude more work. Am I sniping my students by introducing them to arcane dark arts?

We are fast approaching a time when single CPU personal computers will be about as prevalent as clocks with mechanical hands. We can program parallel architectures with mechanical hands, but they may not perform as fast as we want them to.

Advocating "Teach Parallel" makes a lot sense. It may make make equal sense to "Teach Performance" as well. For at least the time being, they might just go hand in hand, quietly humming "Till There Was You".

When I was a student I typically ignored case studies from my textbooks, as do my students, as well they should. I have not taken the time, a fair hunk of time, to prepare assignments based on the case studies. This is the only realistic way to help students absorb them.

I need a better name for the kind of big project I desire for my students. This big project was spawned talking with Rubin Landau about his ideas, with Dan Ernst's projects stirred into the brew as well.

When Dan and I talked, he described some of the case studies and related project assignments he is doing to inject parallel concepts into his curriculum. This is a right thing to do.I also heard Rubin suggest turning CS inside out, to be a form of physics based project learning. This would be wonderful for physics, but the discipline of computer science needs more focus on the CS side of things.

What is appropriate for computer scientists is to have at least one semester long challenging collaborative project, to start the kind of learning Rubin cited as the typical way physicists learn parallel programming: a two year stint as a postdoc where there is code to work on, tied to their research, requiring a supercomputer cluster.

I do think my CS students, usually having good math and science backgrounds, would benefit from a semester long collaborative project. It needs to be one requiring 10s to 100s or more of processors for the solution. It needs to be self contained, and "easily" understood by students. The scaffolding of the project is essential so there is room for open-ended discovery with a high likelihood of success. I am thinking of making it a semester-long whole class effort taking place during my Data Structures course. I would like to have more than one project, so students can choose the one best matching their skills and interests. I will start with it being an extra credit assignment, hopefully extra-credit extended across the other disciplines to incent more diverse students to participate. Another layer might be also structuring it as a student competition. I haven't figured it all out yet.

It is not strange I am charmed to report Rubin is helping me develop my first project, which will be based on quantum chromodynamics, in which students will explore from top to bottom a Feynman path integral simulation, along the lines of what is covered in his book "A Survey of Computational Physics: Introductory Computational Science."

I look forward to a boatload of collaboration with Rubin, dosed with the constructive bantering we usually have.

I realize that I banter a lot with the people I like and just realized why. We can let our guard down and safely discuss initial thoughts and half-baked ideas. Most of mine are quarter to half-baked. This is a very good thing: enjoyable and supportive of dashing toward desired goals.

Any ideas for well defined and contained, computationally rich problems?

In a previous blog-post, we ended up talking about diversity of problem solving ability. Check out the diversity of the competing students: http://contracosta.edu/cs/tg09studentCompetition.jpg. An even greater diversity is seen in the pictures of all the students attending TG09 at http://contracosta.edu/cs/tg09Students.jpg: age, color of skin, color of shirt, hues of enthusiasm and ideas. Heady stuff, that. My team from Contra Costa College also competed: http://contracosta.edu/cs/tg09CCCstudentTeam.JPG. I am very proud of them and told them so. They asked if that meant they had scored well in the 9 hour-long contest in which they'd competed the previous day. I told them we hadn't started the grading, which due to busy hours, would ultimately not complete till late into the night preceding the awards ceremony. They we're still confusing grades/awards with recognition of their outstanding dedicated effort. We have a lot more time to get that one straight.

The Clemson team was coached by Brian Dean, an enlightened teacher, in many interesting respects, including a clever way of generating a flash animation of narrated class notes. He also leads the USA Computing Olympiad. Coincidentally, I'd been brainstorming with Alejandro Queiruga from CMU, a name not only resonant with that of Alonso Quijano, but also a young look-alike, complete with a wonderfully developed productive madness. I know it was productive because he suggested a number of interesting follow-on competitions for us to consider. The one that caught my attention was embedded systems programming. Boy did this catch my attention. What a clever way to return to the non-bloated (memory/disk/executable) days of computing, where performance counted. A jaunt playing games and watching movie clips with a few other students till 3am, led us Alejandro and I to the refinement of the cell processor being a great basis for the contest. It is a gloriously difficult programming environment including heterogeneous processors using a non-standard OS. Perfect. When I pitched it to Brian the next day he correctly noted that it would make things almost impossible for the competing high school students, which actually what attracted me in the first place. I have a lot of experience assigning problems to students a working professional would correctly identify as difficult to impossible. The trick is to give the students no clue of that, including the unnecessary burden that it can't be done. It frees them to more easily solve the problem.

I am hoping we can work out a compromise for I think helping students gain a working hands-on knowledge of squeezing cycles from reluctant silicon is not only great fun, but worthwhile life skills for a CS professional.

By the way, Alejandro, here are the words as I remember hearing them in a theater in San Francisco when I was roughly your age, words Wasserman put in Cervantes mouth I suggested you memorize: "I have lived for over forty years, and I have seen life as it is: pain, misery, hunger, cruelty beyond belief. I have heard the singing from taverns and the moans from bundles of filth on the street. I have been a soldier and seen my comrades fall in battle, or die more slowly under the lash in Africa. I have held them in my arms at the final moment. These were men who saw life as it is, yet they died despairing; no glory, no gallant last words, only their eyes filled with confusion, whimpering the question: 'Why?'. I do not believe they asked why they were dying, but why they had lived. When life itself seems lunatic, who knows where madness lies? Perhaps to be too practical is madness. To surrender dreams may be madness. To seek treasure where there is only trash. Too much sanity may be madness. And maddest of all to see life as it is, and not as it should be!"

So readers, what do you think would be a good basis for a computing oriented contest? I'll bet you don't come up with Alejandro’s other very clever idea. I'll leave it for his elaboration, should he choose to grace this blog.

May we all heed Cervantes' words, avoiding any unnecessary sanity, while crafting life as it should be. I won't contest that while seeking to build a contest around it.

The interview with Charlie Peck prompted this blog. For he is the one infecting me with new ways of helping students. At Earlham, students are involved in all aspects of their education. Charlie brought students to Shodor and SC sponsored workshops; students to help as assistant instructors, and to participate with development of the many projects we have fashioned for ourselves.

A curious thing happened. Many of the students of Paul, Charlie and Dave have become my students, some of them for life, even though not one has set foot in my classroom.

We discovered another layer to add to our teaching: an apprenticeship model. What we cover in a classroom, even the experiential parts of our courses, are inextricably linked to the summative task of working for grades. With an apprenticeship model, students choose to become involved; there are no grades, just open-ended tasks to complete well so we can deploy their results. Many "students" have stayed with us years after graduating.

Another curious thing happened. Students who might have been judged mediocre based solely on their grades, demonstrated extraordinary competence and expertise.

I can only relate the anecdotal to you, since there is no evaluative process in place to sift and sort what is taking place.

I teach in a two-year community college, hearing that students don't become interesting till their junior year, or that meaningful preparation cannot happen in community colleges.

I took three students to the SC-08 student programming competition, where teams were graded on how well they could solve the 12 assigned problems. The six students of the CMU team came in first, but we were told our three students were a close second.

Charlie and I led a parallel programming workshop in Turkey last January, where we took three student assistants, Teddy from my college. Teddy learned OpenMP, which I did not teach him in class, since I don't yet offer a community college course in parallel programming. Teddy rose to the call and was as integral to the success of the workshop as any of us.

Kay was one of Paul's students from the University of Northern Iowa. I soon asked her to come as one of my two student assistants to a workshop we ran at UCSD. Last week, I was leading a workshop at Kean University, where Kay was a full-fledged instructor. Incidentally, she is also the creator of debianclusters.org, a site heavily used be folk seeking to create computational clusters. I am very blessed to have Kay as both a friend and colleague.

What is a student worth? They are without price, because they are integral to the honing of our teaching skills and our abilities to foster the same student's growth. The key is extending our time to include out of class dialogue while working on common goals.

... Tom