Teaching parallel computing in a small college: meeting a renewed demand

  • Authors:

  • Xinlian Liu

  • Affiliations:

  • Hood College, Frederick, MD

  • Venue:
  • Journal of Computing Sciences in Colleges
  • Year:
  • 2008

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Abstract

Fitting scientific computing training in a small liberal arts college curricula has always been a challenge, and even more so in an era when new hardware and architecture are emerging almost on a yearly basis which makes some of the learning objectives a moving target. When video game consoles are commanded by the 'supercomputing on a chip' processor CELL, and multi-core CPUs become the mainstream of lower end desktop solution, we are witnessing a renewed demand from students to offer a course in parallel computing. This paper attempts to address these challenges by weighing the interest of students, the efficiency of various parallel programming models as well as the resource limitations of a small college. In a progressive way, we present a pragmatic approach of teaching parallel computing designed particularly in response to the changing landscape in scientific computing and the wide adoption of multi-core processors.