by Tom Murphy, Paul Gray, Charlie Peck, and Dave Joiner
“The oft-contended best simple statement is that we need ubiquitous parallelism in the classroom. Once upon a time, it was solely the lunatic fringe, programming esoteric architectures squirreled away in very special corners of the globe that cared about parallelism. In the near future, most electronic devices will have multiple cores which would benefit greatly from parallel programming. The low hanging fruit is, of course, the student’s laptop, and aiding the student to make full use of that laptop.
Our perception of next steps comes from close to a decade of collaboration pushing parallel and distributed computing education. This doesn’t mean we are right, just that we have been walking the walk. Three of the four of us are computer scientists and Dave, our physicist, is essentially also one (of course he claims that we’re all physicists). The bulk of our time together, outside of our respective day jobs teaching, is spent leading week-long workshops for faculty — largely focused on the teaching of parallel and distributed programming and computational thinking. Our assertion is this: As computer architectures evolve from single core to multicore to manycore, the computer science curriculum must experience a commensurate single-course to multi-course to many-course evolution in terms of where parallelism is studied. ”
