Editors’ Introduction and Roadmap

Abstract

The premise of the NSF-supported Center for Parallel and Distributed Computing Curriculum Development and Educational Resources (CDER) is that every computer science (CS) and computer engineering (CE) undergraduate student should achieve a basic skill level in parallel and distributed computing (PDC). This book is a companion to our 2015 book, the first product of the CDER Book Project.

Appendix: A Brief History of The NSF/TCPP Curriculum Initiative

The pervasiveness of computing devices containing multicore CPUs and GPUs, including PCs, laptops, tablets, and mobile devices, is making even casual users of computing technology beneficiaries of parallel processing. Certainly, technology has developed to the point where it is no longer sufficient for even basic programmers to acquire only the sequential programming skills that are the staple in computing curricula. The trends in technology point to the need for imparting a broad-based skill set in PDC technology at various levels in the educational fabric woven by Computer Science and Computer Engineering programs as well as their allied computational disciplines. To address this need, a curriculum working group drawn from the IEEE Technical Committee on Parallel Processing (TCPP), the National Science Foundation (NSF), and sibling communities such as the ACM and industry, has taken up the challenge of proposing and refining a curricular guidleines for blending PDC-related concepts into even early-stage undergraduate curricula in computational areas. This working group is built around a constant core of members and typically includes members from all segments of the computing world and the geographical world. A first version of the group’s guidelines for a core curriculum that includes PDC was released informally in December, 2010, with a formal version ^Fn3 following in December 2012. The CS2013 ACM/IEEE Computer Science Curriculum Joint Task Force has recognized the need to integrate parallel and distributed computing topics in the early core courses in the computer science and computer engineering curriculum, and has collaborated with our working group in leveraging our curricular guidelines. The CS2013 curriculum⁵ explicitly refers to the NSF/TCPP curricular guideines for comprehensive coverage of parallelism (and provides a direct hyperlink to the guidelines).

The enthusiastic reception of the CDER guidelines has led to a commitment within the working group to continue to develop the guidelines and to foster their adoption at an even broader range of academic institutions. Toward these ends, the Center for Curriculum Development and Educational Resources (CDER) was founded, with the five editors of this volume comprising the initial Board of Directors. An expanded version of the working group has taken up the task of revising and expanding the 2012 NSF/TCPP curriculum during the 2016–2018 timeframe. One avenue for expansion has been to add special foci on a select set of important aspects of computing that are of particular interest today – Big Data, Energy-Aware Computing, Distributed Computing – and to develop Exemplars that will assist instructors in assimilating the guidelines’ suggested topics into their curricula. CDER has initiated several activities toward the goal of fostering PDC education.

• 1. A courseware repository ⁶ has been established for pedagogical materials – sample lectures, recommended problem sets, experiential anecdotes, evaluations, papers, etc. This is a living repository. CDER invites the community to contribute existing and new material to it. The Exemplars aspect group is working to provide extensive set of exemplars for various topics and courses.

• 2. An Early Adopter Program has been established to foster the adoption and evaluation of the guidelines. This activity has fostered educational work on PDC at more than 100 educational institutions in North and South America, Europe, and Asia. The Program has thereby played a major role in establishing a worldwide community of people interested in develo** and implementing PDC curricula. Additional early adopter training workshops and competitions are planned.

• 3. The EduPar workshop series has been established. The original instantiation of EduPar was as a satellite of the International Parallel and Distributed Processing Symposium (IPDPS). EduPar was – and continues to be – the first education-oriented workshop at a major research conference. The success of EduPar led to the development of a sibling workshop, EduHPC, at the Supercomputing Conference (SC) in 2013. In 2015 EduPar and EduHPC was joined by a third sibling workshop, Euro-EduPar, a satellite of the International Conference on Parallel Computing (EuroPar). CDER has also sponsored panels, and BOF and special sessions at the ACM Conference on Computer Science Education (SIGCSE).

• 4. A CDER Compute Cluster has been setup for free accesses by the early adopters and other educators and their students. The CDER cluster is a heterogeneous 14-node cluster featuring 280 cores, 1 TB of RAM, and GPUs that are able to sustain a mixed user workload.⁷