Teaching with Parallella: a First Look in an Undergraduate Parallel Computing Course *

This paper describes our experience integrating the Parallella, an energy efficient single board computer (SBC) with 18 cores, into an undergraduate parallel computing course. The board's small form-factor, high number of cores and relative cheapness makes it a very attractive option for introducing students to parallel computing. We describe and reflect on our experiences using the Parallella board, and offer novel educational materials that will assist others to incorporate the Parallella into future computing courses. INTRODUCTION The ubiquity of multi-core architectures in recent years makes teaching parallel and distributed computing (PDC) concepts to undergraduates more imperative than ever. Despite the fact that most laptops, tablets, and smart-phones contain multi-core chips, computer science undergraduates are still largely exposed to serial languages. The need for more extensive parallel computing education is underscored with the release of the ACM/IEEE Computer Science Curricula 2013 (CS2013) [1], which recommends that 15 hours of PDC concepts be included in the typical undergraduate computer science program. Other efforts, such as the IEEE Curriculum Initiative on Parallel and Distributed Computing (NSF/IEEE TCPP) [19] and the CSinParallel community [7], are seeking to ___________________________________________ * Copyright © 2015 by the Consortium for Computing Sciences in Colleges. Permission to copy without fee all or part of this material is granted provided that the copies are not made or distributed for direct commercial advantage, the CCSC copyright notice and the title of the publication and its date appear, and notice is given that copying is by permission of the Consortium for Computing Sciences in Colleges. To copy otherwise, or to republish, requires a fee and/or specific permission.