Fall-11: Early Adoption of NSF/TCPP PDC Curriculum at Texas Tech University and Beyond

Yong ChenYu ZhuangNoe Lopez-BenitezMay 10th, 2013

Curriculum Design and Changes

Covered four undergraduate courseso Core course CS 3375 (Computer Architecture)o Elective course CS 4379 (Parallel and Concurrent Programming)o Core course CS 2350 (Computer Organization and Assembly

Language Programming)o New elective course CS 4331 (High Performance Computing)

Changes implemented primarily includeo Cutting-edge new technologies, architectureso Application Programming Interfaces (APIs)o Programming exampleso Algorithms

Designed to increase students’ enthusiasm and knowledge

about parallel and distributed computing

Curriculum Design and Changes (cont.)

Core course CS 3375 (Computer Architecture)o Expanded ILP, added multiprocessor, multi-computer architectureso Added multithreading and multi-core technologieso Dropped digital functional units due to coverage in ECE 2372

Core CS 2350 (Computer Organization and ALP)o Enhanced to address 64-bit programming, Intel x64 architectureso Enhanced to introduce floating point and SIMD instructions

Elective CS 4379 (Parallel and Concurrent Programming)o Increased the focus on parallel programming, CUDA, MPIo Matrix and graph problems and algorithms covered

New elective course CS 4331 (High Performance

Computing) o Focus on hands-on experience and applications of PDC in HPCo Applications, systems (e.g. energy-efficient HPC), deployment

Derrick Franco“The company I work for, Amplisine Labs, uses multithreaded programs in all of the products we make. Your class CS 3375, Computer Architecture, helped me understand multi threading more than I had before. It has definitely helped me create better programs for Amplisine as well.”

“The company I work for, Amplisine Labs, uses multithreaded programs in all of the products we make. Your class CS 3375, Computer Architecture, helped me understand multi threading more than I had before. It has definitely helped me create better programs for Amplisine as well.”

An undergrad team with 6 students applied PDC knowledge in the Student Cluster Competition at the ACM/IEEE Supercomputing (SC’12) conference

Two students received job offers directly related with PDC trainings, and two other students have intended to continue graduate education in PDC areas

An undergrad team with 6 students applied PDC knowledge in the Student Cluster Competition at the ACM/IEEE Supercomputing (SC’12) conference

Two students received job offers directly related with PDC trainings, and two other students have intended to continue graduate education in PDC areas

Experiences, Improvements, Ongoing Work, and Conclusion

Experienceso The PDC curriculum is a timely & comprehensive education resourceso Topics, suggested hours, Bloom level expectations helpful

Possible Improvementso Adopt scientific applications/real systems as motivationo Provide project samples, e.g. a systematic cross-course project

Ongoing and Future Worko Covers GPU architecture in CS 3375, OpenCL programming in CS

4379, and early research experience in CS 4331o To further elevate the need of PDC and carry out a quality education

Conclusiono PDC curriculum adopted at TTU in four undergrad courseso Seek further sponsorship to continue efforts to reach long-term goals

Thank You.

Please visit our poster for more details andhttp://discl.cs.ttu.edu/

Acknowledgment: this work is sponsored by the National Science Foundation and IEEE Computer Society Technical Committee on Parallel Processing via the NSF-TCPP Early Adopter Status award made to the Texas Tech University.