Concurrency In the Classroom

"Concurrency in the classroom" is not about Instant Messaging with your pals while listening to your professor drone on about the relevance of Chaucer or explain how peep-hole optimizers work. No, concurrency in the classroom is about the emergence of multi-core processors, the importance of multi-threaded programming, and making the most of resources at hand. It's about the future of software development, in other words.

To drive this point home, Intel has launched global programs to prepare university students for a new paradigm of software development as we transition from single-processor engines to those that will have multiple cores and threads--a shift that transforms software design and requires a new way of thinking. As part of this education program, Intel is providing 45 of the world’s top universities with expertise, funding, development tools, educational materials, on-site training, and sustained collaboration to incorporate multi-core and multi-threading concepts into their computer science curricula.

Participating universities include Carnegie Mellon University, Cornell University, Georgia Institute of Technology, University of Michigan, and University of Washington, along with institutions across Brazil, China, India, Mexico, Russia, Taiwan, and several European countries. The first courses will be offered during the fall term this year and Intel expects hundreds more universities to participate in 2007 and beyond.

"To usher in a new generation of computing technology and bring creative new products to market, it’s crucial to educate tomorrow’s software developers to architect, develop and debug the next generation of software for modern, multi-core platforms," said Renee James, corporate vice president and general manager of Intel’s Software and Solutions Group. "The full potential of multi-core based systems to deliver great performance and expanded usages is unleashed when software is designed to take advantage of the full capabilities of the machine. Working with the world’s best universities, Intel is creating the future for performance computing."

"Intel’s support in multi-core education is critical for two reasons," said Karsten Schwan, professor of College of Computing, Georgia Institute of Technology. "First, getting early access to advanced technology and new equipment is something that always excites students. Second, companies like Intel have a perspective that looks beyond research to see the broader potential for technology."

The curriculum conveniently provides an introduction to Intel multi-core architecture and teaches computer science students how to achieve maximum performance of their programs on threaded, multi-core, and multi-processor systems using Intel compilers and threading tools. It also covers the importance of parallelism, threading concepts, threading methodology and programming with threads (Windows, OpenMP, PThreads).

Posted by Jon Erickson at 08:26 AM  Permalink