Multicore breaks a fundamental link in how we prepare our current and future developers – teach them to break a problem down into pieces and find a nice logical progression to solve each individual piece sequentially. A normal CS curriculum gets around to telling people about the idea of concurrent execution only as they have one foot out the door (senior-level systems courses, if then). At Georgia Tech we’ve been trying to tackle this by trying to integrate bits of multi-core throughout the curriculum – introduced gently into the entry classes as “my isn’t it interesting when that happens”, and getting increasingly more focused as time goes on. This admittedly means we have to forgo teaching some things to make space in the curriculum, but so far it has been surprisingly little.

Professor Matthew Wolf, Research Scientist CERCS Center Computational Science and Engineering College of Computing Georgia Institute.

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Related Links
Academic Webinar on Multicore Curriculum