Dr. Manav Misra
Dept of MCS
Colorado School of Mines
Golden, CO 80401
mmisra@mines.edu
A course in Parallel Computing for Scientists and
Engineers
The goal of this course is to introduce parallel computing as an
important tool in any scientist or engineer's toolkit. All science
and engineering disciplines are faced with large computational
problems that can benefit immensely from high performance computing.
Unfortunately, most traditional undergraduate curricula do not
formally instruct non-computer scientists in the techniques necessary
to exploit parallel computers efficiently. As with other aspects of
CSE, these skills can only be mastered by a hands-on experience.
Students in the course are therefore required to work on a
sufficiently complex problem that interests them and implement the
solution on a parallel machine. The computational skills necessary
are provided just in time for their utility to be evident. Since it
is unrealistic to expect undergraduate students to choose a problem of
sufficient complexity early in the semester, the students are
encouraged to work with mentors from diverse science and engineering
disciplines. Mentors provide the initial problem, and information
about the problem during the semester. The advantages of this system
over exposure to a small selection of pre-designed problems are
numerous: the students get to work on problems of interest to them,
thus enhancing their learning experience; the problems are realistic
ones that the mentors are already working on; each student gets to
work closely with a mentor and learns problem solving techniques from
him/her in addition to the skills taught in class. In addition to the
term project, learning in the course takes place in the form of
lectures on the fundamental issues of parallel computing, group
discussions in class, discussions on the class newsgroup, and external
readings. In-class lectures are supplemented by WWW materials which
have appropriate links to the WWW version of the text-book used for
the class ("Designing and Building Parallel Programs", by Ian Foster).
In Fall 1995, undergraduate students were grouped together with
graduate students to form teams that could work together on large
projects. Thus, the undergraduate students were mentored by the
graduate students as well as the project mentors.
Thomas L. Marchioro II
uces_info@krellinst.org
17 July, 1997