Preparing Computer Science Students for an Increasingly Parallel World: Teaching Parallel Computing Early and Often

The ubiquity of parallel computing resources presents a pressing challenge to the entire computer science discipline. The thrust of this challenge is to find ways to better equip computer science students with skills to face an increasingly parallel world. Although there is general agreement that undergraduates should learn parallel computing concepts, there is debate about when parallel programming should be taught and to what extent. Recently, the NSF/IEEE-TCPP PDC committee and ACM have emphasized the need for integrating parallel computing topics across the curriculum [1, 3]. Although these initiatives have garnered strong support from the community, there remain key challenges in realizing this vision. The pedagogy of teaching current PDC topics to undergraduates is yet to mature and major curriculum revisions are problematic, particularly for departments in larger universities where revisions to the curriculum require significant planning and effort including training of faculty teaching lower-level classes, complying with administrative policies of the university curriculum board and tracking graduation credits for majors under the revised curriculum.