By Abi Sundaram, published on Intel Software Network
Every student (including me!) upon graduation hopes their University has prepared them with all the skills to beat out the applicant sitting next to them for a job. Before joining as an intern with the Intel Academic Community, my conception of parallelism was to the say the least hazy. It was something I had at some point heard in lecture and buried far in the back of my brain in case I had to define it on a test sometime in the future. Through my time as an Intern my relationship with parallelism has become, for lack of a better word, intimate. With more and more manufacturers shifting towards many-core platforms, parallelism is making a strong presence in today’s computer industry and, whether I liked it or not, it was a change I, and all computer science students, will have to reckon with.

So, as a student in the middle of this whirlwind of change, it would be nice to know what the revised list of skills is to beat out that applicant sitting next to me for a job. Luckily for me, this year’s Supercomputing Conference had a panel session on just this issue. It was called ‘Preparing for Extreme Parallel Environments’ and it featured some of the greatest minds in academia and industry engaged in thought-provoking discussion on how industry and academia can prepare for a parallel world.

This year’s SC10 panel addressed three main questions everybody involved was itching to have answered.
1.) What does Industry expect from academia to prepare students for the workforce?
2.) What Changes must occur in curriculum to support High Performance Computing (HPC) and Programming models?
3.) What programming models are needed to support HPC and Parallel Programming?

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