The Status of Parallel Processing Education Russ Miller State University of New York at Buffalo
The IEEE Technical Committee on Parallel Processing (TCPP) was formed in 1992 to provide a forum for scientists and engineers throughout the world to exchange ideas on parallel processing. As part of its mission, the TCPP is concerned with establishing guidelines for parallel processing education. This report concentrates on developing the basis for such an undertaking by examining the status of parallelism in the postsecondary education process. In October 1992, the first Newsletter of the Technical Committee on Parallel Processing was distributed to more than 4,000 members of the IEEE Computer Society. The newsletter contained a request for information regarding current and proposed mechanisms (new and revised courses, seminars, and so forth) for incorporating parallelism into the education process. Subsequently, direct mailings were sent to chairs of computer science and engineering departments, and a request for information was posted to the newsgroup “comp.paralle1.” The full TCPP report contains course descriptions and class listings from more than 70 sites -including undergraduate institutions, university centers, research institutes, and corporations around the world - that offer educational opportunities involving parallelism. A brief synopsis of this information is presented in the following table. Interested readers can obtain
40
the full report via anonymous ftp in the directory userdmiller on ftp.cs.buffalo.edu. This report will be continuously updated as either new entries or modifications to existing entries are submitted. The full report should provide insight for the community at large in terms of developing individual curricula that incorporate parallelism. In addition, this report should be of use to high school and college students who are interested in continuing their education and incorporating parallelism into that process. After reviewing the information provided from various sites, the following trends appear to have emerged.
’
At four-year colleges, courses in parallelism are beginning to appear. Many of these colleges have access to either a small parallel machine (typically, transputerbased) or a small network of workstations. These machines are used for projects in the courses and for independent studies on parallelism. The trend at university centers in terms of graduate-level education appears to be to provide an array of courses, including parallel algorithms, parallel programming, and parallel architectures, to name a few. Typically, the students have access to machines either at the university or at a National Science
0018-9162/94/$4.008 1994 IEEE
Foundation-sponsored site. Typical machines used in the classroom include those manufactured by Maspar, Thinking Machines (both the CM-2 and CM-5), Intel, and Ncube. The trend at university centers in terms of undergraduate education appears to be to include aspects of parallelism in a variety of traditional courses (for example, algorithms, architecture, operating systems, and programming languages) and to provide at most one introductory course in parallel processing. However, one interesting exception is the one-year laboratory course in high-performance scientific computing being developed with NSF support at the University of Colorado at Boulder. Finally, we would like to mention an electronic facility called parlib, which contains entries of 37 schools with a graduate emphasis on parallel processing. Parlib can be reached via e-mail at
[email protected].
Acknowledgments This work was partially supported by NSF grant IRI-9108288 and by a grant made available from New York State/United University Professionals. Readers can contact Russ Miller at the Department of Computer Science,State University of New York, Buffalo, NY 14260; e-mail
[email protected].
COMPUTER
some of the information found in the full TCPP report.
0 = Subjects covered in under-
graduate courses Subjects covered in graduate courses NS = Number of courses unspecified =
Auburn University
3
Bucknell University
1
California Institute of Technology
NS
4 0
O.
O.
O.
0
0
0
0
0
I
NS
Clarke College
1
0
0
0
Colgate University
1
0
0
0
Colorado State University
1
Connecticut College
1
Cornell University
1
3
Dartmouth College
NS
1
Drexel University
1
Eastern Connecticut State Univ.
2
Edinburgh Parallel Computing Cntr.
2
O m Om Om
... 0
.
0
m
w
0
1
0
0
0
Gallaudet University
1
0
0
0
Gettysburg College
1
0
0
0
Harvard University
1
0
0
0
Illinois State University
1
Iowa State University
1
Macalaster College
1
Michigan State University
2
Michigan Technology University
1
New Jersey Institute of Technology
5
m 0
0
.
. 0
0
. 0
0 0
6
5
0
0
5
Mississippi State University
August 1994
Om
m
0
1
Om
0 0
0
0
0
North Dakota State University
O.
0
0 = Subjects covered in under-
graduate courses
W
= Subjects covered in graduate
courses NS = Number of courses unspecified Northeastern University Northwestern University Ohio University, Athens Oregon Graduate Inst. Sci. & Tech. Oregon State University Pennsylvania State University Polytechnic University, Brooklyn Purdue University Rice University Rochester Institute of Technology St. Bonaventure IJniversity St. John Fisher College San Jose State University Sangamon State University SUNY-Buffalo 0
SUNY-Geneseo 0
SUNY-Oswego
2
Texas Institute of Technology University of Arizona
1
University of Bergen, Norway UC Berkeley UC Irvine 42
1 NS
M
0
0
0
M
0
W
W
1
2
University of Arkansas
.
.
W 0
.
0
3
M
M
M
2
W
M
W
W
COMPUTER
0 = Subjects covered in undergraduate courses = Subjects covered in graduate courses NS = Number of courses unspecified
UC Los Angeles
2
3
UC San Diego
1
4
UC Santa Cruz
NS
1
University of Central Florida
6
3
University of Colorado
2
University of Delaware
2
3
University of Edinburgh
1
University of Florida
2
University of Houston, Downtown
1
University of Idaho
1
Univ. of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign
4
1
1
University of Minnesota
2
1
University of Nebraska, Omaha
2
University of Notre Dame
1
University of San Francisco
1
University of Tennessee
2
6
O.
O.
O.
O.
0
0
0
.
B
O.
0
0 0
OD
.
0
0
O.
O.
O.
0
0
O.
. ... . . ... . . ... . . 0
OB
.
0
0
D
0
0
.
0 0
0
0
0
O.
OB
0
0
0
0
W
Union College
1
Walla Walla College
1
0
0
0
Wellesley College
1
0
0
0
August 1994
1
Om
0
0
2
University of Wisconsin, Madison
O.
O.
0
5
University of Southern California
O.
0
2
University of Oklahoma
.
. .. . ... . O.
O.
0
NS
University of Iowa
0
OD 0
0
43
