Analogies for teaching parallel computing to inexperienced programmers

Authors:
Henry Neeman;Lloyd Lee;Julia Mullen;Gerard Newman
Affiliations:
University of Oklahoma, Norman OK;University Pomona, Pomona CA;Solidus Technical Solutions, Lunenburg MA;University of Oklahoma, Norman OK
Venue:
ITiCSE-WGR '06 Working group reports on ITiCSE on Innovation and technology in computer science education
Year:
2006

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Abstract

Parallel computing is increasingly a requirement of Computational Science and Engineering (CSE) software because problems of interest are very large and hardware systems are becoming parallel through multicore technologies. Inexperienced programmers-non-computer scientists with one semester to a few years of programming experience-are crucial to CSE software development because academic research teams rely on them as application developers. For this group, the basic concepts of parallelism can be explained by analogies rather than through exploring the specifics of various technologies. These analogies are also useful for computer scientists who are new to parallel computing.