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April 2007
April 23, 2007
Teaching Multicore
Now that multicore processors are moving from niche to mainstream, university computer science programs are finding they need to do the same with classes focused on multiprocessor computing. What was once a specialty area is quickly becoming the computing norm, and many more computer science students (some might argue all such students) will need classes in this area. But developing curricula around any new technology takes time. What to do?
The University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign's answer to this question is to team up with NVIDIA to teach students how to program massively parallel processors. Dr. David Kirk, chief scientist at NVIDIA, and Dr. Wen-mei Hwu, the AMD Jerry Sanders Chair of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Illinois are co-teaching the course, which makes use of NVIDIA programming tools such as the CUDA C programming environment.
According to Kirk:
"Traditionally, computer science and computer engineering education has not really addressed parallel processing as an important part of programming. It's a graduate course and it's an elective. As we move forward with multi-core processors and highly parallel GPUs, everybody will need to know how to program massively parallel processors because that's all there will be. There won't be any single core processors any more."
Partnerships between universities and private companies are nothing new, of course. Industry has been funding scholarships and equipment purchases and paying salaries in many fields at many schools. It makes good business sense to encourage universities to turn out graduates that have the skills your company needs. What is less common is an employee of such an outside company actually teaching the course.
Some schools may see this as an ethical line they don't wish to cross, and certainly there are issues of bias that should be monitored in such cases, but it could be hugely beneficial for students. There's no substitute for practical instruction from people who create real products in the real world. But there's a fine line to be walked here. Universities must also be careful not to sell out their students' futures to the highest bidder.
Posted by Kevin Carlson at 12:34 PM Permalink
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