Multicore
Programming Education 2009
Workshop on Directions in Multicore Programming Education
Sunday, March 8, 2009, Washington DC,
USA
Co-located with ASPLOS 2009
The acceptance of multiprocessors as the mainstream computing
platform requires a fundamental change in the way we develop software. There
are no textbooks and few reference books addressing how to program
multiprocessors. Most engineers learn the tricks of the trade by asking help
from more experienced friends and through a laborious trial and error
process. This state of affairs must change, and the change must come
through the development of an appropriate educational curriculum, one that
addresses today’s needs and one that will capture the rapid developments in
multiprocessing hardware, operating systems, and programming languages.
A glance at the 2001 ACM computing curricula shows that
net-centric computing is introduced at the intermediate level as a core topic.
This emphasis reflects the advent of the web and Internet in the mid-90s. We
expect that multiprocessor architectures will have an equally broad effect on
everyday programming, and that similarly, the associated body of knowledge will
become a core area of the curriculum within a few years.
This workshop will attempt to bring together researchers and
educators, with the goal of developing, through dialog, a better understanding
of the possible directions to take in order to bring multicore programming
education to the masses.
The workshop will feature 8 distinguished speakers, prominent
researchers and educators in the area of multiprocessor programming. The
speakers will present their approach, experiences, and suggestions for
educational directions, and later participate in an open panel with the
workshop attendees.
Resources
for Multicore Programming Education
The Workshop’s
Invited Speakers (follow links for biographical
information)
The Program (follow
links for short abstracts and talk slides)
9:00 am -
Welcome and Introduction
Nir Shavit – Tel Aviv University
Session 1:
Approaches
9:10 am
– 10:10 am 2 Invited talks
Guy Steele: “The
Future Is Parallel: What's a Programmer to Do? Breaking Sequential Habits of
Thought” (pdf)
Tim Mattson: “Teaching
people how to `think parallel’”
(pdf)
10:10 am –
coffee break
10:30 am –
11:30 am 2 Invited talks
Maurice Herlihy: “It
ain't the meat it's the notion: why Theory is essential to teaching concurrent
programming” (ppt)
Michael Scott: “Don't
Start with Dekker's Algorithm: Top-Down Introduction of Concurrency” (ppt)
11:30 am –
12:30 pm Panel with the 4 invited speakers
12:30 pm –
2:00 pm Workshop Lunch
Session 2:
Directions
2:00 pm – 3:00 pm 2 Invited talks
Arvind: “A
Case for Teaching Parallel Programming to Freshmen” (ppt)
Guy Blelluch: “Parallel
Thinking” (ppt)
3:00 pm –
coffee break
3:20 pm –
4:20 pm 2 Invited talks
Dan Grossman: “Parallel
Programming in Undergraduate Education: A View from the Ground” (ppt)
Marc Snir: “Is
Parallel programming Really Hard?” (pdf)
4:20 pm –
5:20 pm Panel with 4 invited speakers
5:20 pm –
Concluding Remarks
Organizer
Nir
Shavit, Tel-Aviv University
The workshop is supported
by a grant from Sun Microsystems
Paul Gauguin: Where Do We
Come From? What Are We? Where Are We Going?