HiPC 2016 Academic Birds of a Feather (BoF)

HiPC introduced this format in 2014 with the purpose of fostering greater participation by the academic community at HiPC, including both domestic and international representation. With a focus on emerging areas of interest, the goal is to stimulate new research ideas, address specific problems, and build a research community. The ABoF content complements the main conference technical program and workshops that have peer-reviewed papers.

HiPC 2016 Topic: Education in Parallel and Distributed Computing

The subject of parallel computing, or its variants, is usually taught at most institutions as an elective at the undergraduate level. Parallelism in computing is now a reality at the systems level with the widespread availability of computer systems. Hence, it is important to sensitize the undergraduate students to this model where computations can be now expressed and executed more naturally in a parallel manner. Doing so would impact early undergraduate courses such as Data Structures, Computer Programming, Algorithms, Computer Organization, and the like. Assessing the nature of changes and their impact is highly non-trivial and requires careful and calibrated actions.

The ABoF session on Education in Parallel and Distributed Computing is aimed at fostering the early introduction of topics from the CDER curriculum on parallel and distributed computing. It is also to be noted that about a number of academicians from India have actively participated in the US-NSF Early Adopter program for the past few years, and several will be participating in the this ABoF session at HiPC in Hyderabad. These individuals have been instrumental in introducing the topics related to parallel and distributed computing in early undergraduate education in their respective institutions and can share their experience and discuss challenges in this area.

The session will be organized to include brief talks from Early Adopter Awardees and to discuss best practices and experiences of the early adopters in their country and also recommend action points and suggestions that can be incorporated by the participants in their respective institutions. The session will provide an open discussion forum to address participant questions such as the nature and availability of resources for teaching the intended topics and the suggested mechanisms to incorporate these topics in the teaching plan without sacrificing material on traditional core topics.

Organizers:

• Kishore Kothapalli, IIIT Hyderabad
• R. Govindarajan, IISc, Bengaluru