By Robert Chesebrough
Here are the five role playing activities used at the High School Parallelism bootcamp to put students in the place of procesor cores and had them perform tasks in parallel. These activities proved to be popular among many of the students at the camp, however, some of the more advanced students did express that they felt the exercsies could seem childish.
These exercises laid an excellent foundation that was built upon later with actual computer lab activites using OpenMP and Threading Building Blocks. The activities are best done in groups of 4 or 5 individuals but even two in a single group can.
Activity 1 – Explore Domain Decomposition
Activity 2 – Explore Task Decomposition
Activity 3 –Vector Addition exposes race conditions
Activity 4 –Vector Addition fixed with critical section
Activity 5 – Vector Addition fixed with reduction
