Maryland, Illinois to Offer Joint Course in Parallel Computing

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Prof. Uzi Vishkin

This Fall, Professor Uzi Vishkin will co-teach a joint course on the subject of parallel computing that will be offered to students at the University of Maryland as well as the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in Fall 2010.

Vishkin, a pioneering researcher in the field, will teach ENEE459P: Parallel Algorithms in conjunction with Dr. David Padua, Donald Biggar Willett Professor at Illinois' Department of Computer Science.

Computers have quite suddenly become parallel machines, advancing from one processor core in 2003 to an expected 100 cores or more by 2015 and to 1000 by 2020. This means that programmers who know how to program only one of these cores will soon be limited to utilizing at most 1% of their computer power.

Students enrolled in the course will be exposed to complementary approaches to parallel algorithmic thinking (PAT) provided by the two instructors at the University of Maryland and the University of Illinois through video conferencing.

Such a joint course on a timely topic is an extremely rare opportunity. Advanced by Google, Intel and Microsoft, the introduction of parallelism into the curriculum dominated the recent flagship Computer Science Education Conference. Several speakers, including a Keynote by the Manager of Innovative Software Education at Intel, reported that: (1) In job interviews, employers now expect an intelligent discussion of parallelism; and (2) International competition recognizes that 85% of the people that have been trained in parallel programming are outside the U.S.

The ENEE459P course will highlight parallel algorithmic thinking for obtaining good speed-ups with respect to serial algorithms. The course will cover several parallel programming paradigms as well as strategies for performance tuning for shared, SIMD, and distributed memory target machines. Prerequisite topics include basic knowledge and understanding of algorithms and data structures and computing systems.

More information about this joint course can be found at: http://www.umiacs.umd.edu/users/vishkin/TEACHING/enee459p-f10.html.

Published May 10, 2010