Parallel programming: design of an overview class

• Authors: Christoph von Praun
• Venue: Proceedings of the 2011 ACM SIGPLAN X10 Workshop
• Year: 2011

We designed an introductory parallel programming course at the bachelor level. The class differs from other courses in its structure: The course is organized along the tiers of parallelism [25]. The tiers categorize abstractions and concepts that a software developer can choose when crafting a parallel program. The tiers are from higher to lower abstraction levels: (1) automatic/implicit parallelism, e.g., parallel libraries; (2) deterministic parallelism, e.g., at the level of independent loops; (3) explicitly synchronized, e.g., shared memory with locks; (4) low-level concurrent programming with data races, e.g., lock-free data structures. The goal of the class is to introduce fundamental principles of parallel systems and to expose students to all tiers in the architecture of a parallel system. The course serves as a platform for further exploration in specialized classes. The course has a significant share of lab sessions and programming projects. We chose the programming language X10 as the core technology and found that it facilitates the learning and rapid application of concepts at different abstraction layers and programming models. The language permits to specify common forms of parallelism, data sharing, distribution, and synchronization with succinct syntax and support for an eclipse-based IDE. We report on our first experience in teaching this course, which resulted in very positive student feedback.