Basic Parallel and Distributed Computing Curriculum

With the advent of multi-core processors and their fast expansion, it is quite clear that parallel computing is now a genuine requirement in Computer Science and Engineering (and related) curriculum. In addition to the pervasiveness of parallel computing devices, we should take into account the fact that there are lot of existing softwares that are implemented in the sequential mode, and thus need to be adapted for a parallel execution. Therefore, it is required to the programmer to be able to design parallel programs and also to have some skills in moving from a given sequential code to the corresponding parallel code. In this paper, we present a basic educational scenario on how to give a consistent and efficient background in parallel computing to ordinary computer scientists and engineers. Keywords-HPC; multi-core; scheduling; SIMD; accelerator; benchmark; dependence; graph; shared memory; distributed memory; thread; synchronization;