Parallel Programming Course Research Articles

Evaluation of parallel programming teaching methodologies: On‐campus versus online methodologies

AbstractContributionThis study reveals that the programming paradigm is relevant to obtain advanced programming skills.BackgroundParallel computing has become mandatory for computer science students. The increasing amount of computational resources required by emerging applications need experienced programmers that fully exploit hardware resources. However, the hardware platforms and programming languages to leverage them evolve at a dizzying pace, making very challenging for students the successful learning of the continuously changing high‐performance computing concepts.Research Questions(a) Is the learning curve of the programming language too steep to begin learning parallel programming fundamentals? (b) Are emergent learning methodologies making even more difficult to learn parallel programming in general?MethodologyIt is analyzed the main challenges for succeeding in parallel programming courses at the undergraduate level in two different learning modalities, namely on‐campus and online. It is analyzed the main tools available within a learning management system, showing their impact on online studies.FindingsOur results reveal that the steep learning curve for parallel programming is one of the main barriers to student success, leading to an early drop out of the subject. On‐campus studies mitigate this problem through a close relationship between students and educators. Online studies, however, do not have this tight relationship by its definition.

An approach to task-based parallel programming for undergraduate students

This paper presents the description of a compulsory parallel programming course in the bachelor degree in Informatics Engineering at the Barcelona School of Informatics, Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya UPC-BarcelonaTech. The main focus of the course is on the shared-memory programming paradigm, which facilitates the presentation of fundamental aspects and notions of parallel computing. Unlike the “traditional” loop-based approach, which is the focus of parallel programming courses in other universities, this course presents the parallel programming concepts using a task-based approach. Tasking allows students to explore a broader set of parallel decomposition strategies, including linear, iterative and recursive strategies, and their implementation using the current version of OpenMP (OpenMP 4.5), which offers mechanisms (pragmas and intrinsic functions) to easily map these strategies into parallel programs. Simple models to understand the benefits of a task decomposition and the trade-offs introduced by different kinds of overheads are included in the course, together with the use of tools that allow an easy exploration of different task decomposition strategies and their potential parallelism (Tareador) and instrumentation and analysis of task parallel executions on real machines (Extrae and Paraver).

Teaching concurrent and parallel programming by patterns: An interactive ICT approach

The use of programming patterns is considered to be a conceptual aid for programmers for developing understandable and testable concurrent and parallel code which is not only well built but also safe. By using programming patterns and their implementations as computer programs, difficult new concepts can be smoothly taught in lectures to students who before trying this teaching approach would have been reluctant to enroll on Parallel and Concurrent Programming courses. The approach presented in this paper consists in changing the traditional programming teaching and learning model to one where students are first introduced to syntactical constructs through selected introductory program code-patterns. In the theory lessons that follow, through the use of laptops with multi-core processors and access to the Virtual Campus services of our university, the students are easily able to implement and master the new concepts as they are taught. This teaching experiment was implemented to teach a concurrent and real-time programming course which is part of the computer engineering (CE) degree and taught during the third semester of the CE curriculum. Evaluation of the students’ academic performance when they had been taught with this approach revealed a 20.6% improvement in the students’ end-of-course grades.

Pedagogy and tools for teaching parallel computing at the sophomore undergraduate level

As the need for multicore-aware programmers rises in both science and industry, Computer Science departments in universities around the USA are having to rethink their parallel computing curriculum. At Rice University, this rethinking took the shape of COMP 322, an introductory parallel programming course that is required for all Bachelors students. COMP 322 teaches students to reason about the behavior of parallel programs, educating them in both the high level abstractions of task-parallel programming as well as the nitty gritty details of working with threads in Java.In this paper, we detail the structure, principles, and experiences of COMP 322, gained from 6 years of teaching parallel programming to second-year undergraduates. We describe in detail two particularly useful tools that have been integrated into the curriculum: the HJlibparallel programming library and the Habanero Autograder for parallel programs. We present this work with the hope that it will help augment improvements to parallel computing education at other universities.

A Practical Parallel Programming Course based on Problems of the Spanish Parallel Programming Contest

This paper presents an experience of an introductory course on Parallel Programming. The course is dedicated to parallel programming tools and environments, and in particular to the analysis, development and optimization of parallel algorithms. It has a practical orientation and is guided with the use of problems from the Spanish Parallel Programming Contest. The different units are presented in the traditional lecture format, and a practical session accompanies each unit, with problems to work with in the tools or algorithmic paradigms presented in the previous lecture. The students work in the practical sessions on problems and using the system of the contest, which facilitates online and real time validation of their implementations. The practical approach of the course and the continuous evaluation used led to an important increase in the marks.

Performance-based parallel application toolkit for high-performance clusters

Advances in computer technology, encompassed with fast emerging of multicore processor technology, have made the many-core personal computers available and more affordable. The availability of network of workstations and cluster of many-core SMPs have made them an attractive solution for high performance computing by providing computational power equal or superior to supercomputers or mainframes at an affordable cost using commodity components. In order to search alternative ways to extract unused and idle computing power from these computing resources targeting to improve overall performance, as well as to fully utilize the underlying new hardware platforms, these are major topics in this field of research. In this research paper, the design rationale and implementation of an effective toolkit for performance measurement and analysis of parallel applications in cluster environments is introduced; not only generating parallel applications' timing graph representation, but also to provide application execution's performance data charts. The goal in developing this toolkit is to permit application developers have a better understanding of the application's behavior among selected computing nodes purposed for that particular execution. Additionally, multiple execution results of a given application under development can be combined and overlapped, permitting application developers to perform "what-if" analysis, i.e., to deeper understand the utilization of allocated computational resources. Experimentations using this toolkit have shown its effectiveness on the development and performance tuning of parallel applications, extending the use in teaching of message passing, and shared memory model parallel programming courses.

Grid computing at the undergraduate level

In 2003, MIT Technology Review listed Grid computing as one of 'Ten Emerging Technologies That Will Change the World' [5]. Five years later, is Grid computing ready for the undergraduate classroom? In this panel, a group of educators share their experiences in teaching Grid computing over the past several years and in various settings, and discuss how the subject materials should be developed for the future. Key points under discussion include the place in the undergraduate curriculum, the role of programming exercises, bottom-up versus top-down approaches, and the necessary Grid computing platform. This panel will be of interest to those who teach the subject, and those who wish to introduce Grid computing into their programs. It will also interest those who do not want to offer a full Grid computing course but may wish to introduce Grid computing into existing distributed systems, networking, or parallel programming courses.

A Grid Portal for an Undergraduate Parallel Programming Course

This paper describes an experience of designing and implementing a portal to support transparent remote access to supercomputing facilities to students enrolled in an undergraduate parallel programming course. As these facilities are heterogeneous, are located at different sites, and belong to different institutions, grid computing technologies have been used to overcome these issues. The result is a grid portal based on a modular and easily extensible software architecture that provides a uniform and user-friendly interface for students to work on their programming laboratory assignments.

A state-wide senior parallel programming course

In this paper, we describe an undergraduate parallel programming course based upon networked workstations. The course is offered on the North Carolina Research and Education Network (NC-REN), a private telecommunications network which interconnects universities in North Carolina and provides multiway, face-to-face video, and audio communications. Course materials are described and made available in a new textbook. Topics are divided into basic techniques and applications. In addition, extensive home page materials are described.

PREDULA a multi-paradigm parallel programming and debugging environment

This paper describes the design, implementation and experience of the PREDULA parallel programming language and debugging environment. The motivation is to integrate parallel programming primitives from different paradigms for the purpose of teaching and simulating real-time systems. Semaphores, monitors, communication channels, and restricted ADA rendezvous and processes are all available. Together they simplify teaching of parallel programming and give rise to synergy effects when combined. The system has been successfully used in parallel programming courses at Linköping University. PREDULA primarily inherit from PASCAL and ADA. It is compiled into the ANTS interpreted stack based language, supporting a large number of lightweight processes.