Parallelism Education Workshop @ SC 2011 -- An open invitation

It’s that time again -- I and my colleagues from the Educational Alliance for a Parallel Future (EAPF) which included Adobe, AMD, Intel, Microsoft and a host of other academic and industry partners are happily out challenging the status quo again!

Is parallelism a choke point for the advancement of computing? Education is key.

In a recent lead article in Computerworld, a warning was sounded that lack of Parallel programming skills among developers would be "one of the biggest questions for computing over the next decade."

Shall We MeetUp?

I recently attended the first Parallel Programming MeetUp in Santa Clara California at Intel HQ. The event was put on and hosted by my colleague, Parallel Computing Community Manager, Kathy Farrel. The event was attended by developers, students and academics and was both informative, in that it brought together folks from various segments of the parallel programming community, useful, in that it helped them build contacts with teach other and with Intel and fun. There was even pretty good food considering it was a corporate event ;-)

Brian Harvey helps scratch the itch for Parallelism within Comp Sci AP courses.

In the United States, we have what are called Advanced Placement (AP) courses, designed to give high achieving and ambitious young people in high school a head start before they enter college. There is quite a bit of exciting new work being done on modernizing the AP process for Computer Science, see here, for example.

Teach Parallel at IDF 2009, San Francisco

Dr. John Gustafson, Intel Research

Professores

Estudantes

IDF

Computer Science

Intel

Academic Community

Chien

IDF 2009

Gustafson

Rattner

Computação paralela

Jump-starting the Research Pipeline: Transitioning from Textbook Examples to Real-life Challenges

For students in an undergraduate computer science course-who most likely have no “real world working experience” in their chosen field of study-it is extremely difficult for them to understand why what they are learning is important. They are left wondering how they can apply their skill-sets outside of the classroom. I personally remember that some of my favorite classes at UC Berkeley were rich with examples and stories about how concepts in the lesson plan mapped to the world outside my college environment.

Intel Developer Forum: It's All a Game

Last week at IDF, I had the pleasure of being on the panel - "It's All a Game" with Contra Costa's Professor Tom Murphy, and Intel's Brad Werth. One subliminal - or may be not so subliminal - message that I continued to evangelize (even at this panel) is the suitability of Games as a vehicle for education.

Sure they are complicated, feature many lines of code, involve frameworks, engines, and systems spanning various facets of computer system. But that's what makes them the most appropriate vehicle for education. Let me elaborate.

Sea of cores: Updates from the Beagle's journey

We just had our IDF panel a few hours ago, as promised in the earlier blog post. I made a comparison of our current state of the art in parallel computing to a quote that I got out of Charles Darwin's Origin of Species, and it led to some interesting ripples in the subsequent discussion that I thought I'd share.

Viral Education

A new goal for my educational efforts coalesced today: fostering viral education.

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.

The path to a better world is paved through Informatics: European Computer Science Conference 2009 Paris

It was a sunny day last Thursday in Paris after a very stormy night, I was sitting in the sun filled conference room with 80 deans and Rectors of the top universities in Europe attending the European Computer Science Summit where the first Keynote speaker Dr.

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