Sep OCT OCT 23 2012 2013 2015 2 captures 23 Oct 13 - 17 Oct 15

Close Help

The concurrency era has exploded on us. Multicore systems are now everywhere -- in our laptops, desktops, graphic cards, video game consoles. Symmetric multi-processors and clusters dominate the server and high performance computing market and are the foundation for cloud computing.

There is an urgent need to ensure that newly trained Computer Science graduates are well versed in the principles and practice of concurrent and parallel programming. Following a previous successful workshop on Multicore Programming Education at ASPLOS 2009, and at OOPSLA 2009, this workshop will address several fundamental questions:

• What are the ``fundamental ideas'' of concurrency and parallelism that every Computer Science graduate should know?
• Should concurrency and parallelism be taught ``top-down'' (via high-level abstractions such as operations on collections) or bottom up (with low-level tools such as threads and locks)?
• Should sequential programming be taught as a ``special case'' of concurrent and parallel programming?
• Should concurrency and parallelism issues be addressed in introductory computer science courses?
• Should concurrency and parallelism topics be ``sprinkled'' in existing courses (e.g. in architecture, systems, programming languages, algorithms) -- if so which topics in those courses should be taken out to make room? Should these topics be taught in their own separate stream?

This workshop aims to bring together practitioners and thinkers to address this topic. It will be organized around the presentation of position papers selected by the PC, and a panel discussion.

The schedule for the workshop is presented below. Other participants will have the opportunity to present their views in a special "hot topics" session, where participants will be provided with 5 minute slots to make a presentation.

Workshop Program and Proceedings

8:30 - 8:45	Welcome
8:45 - 9:20	Ready-For-Use: 3 Weeks of Parallelism and Concurrency in a Required Second-Year Data-Structures Course, slides Dan Grossman
9:20 - 9:40	The Impending Ordinariness of Teaching Concurrent Programming Doug Lea
9:40 - 10:00	Concurrency and Parallelism as a Medium for Computer Science Concepts,slides Steven Bogaerts, Kyle Burke, Brian Shelburne, and Eric Stahlberg
10:00-10:30	Morning Break
10:30 - 10:50	An undergraduate curriculum infused with parallelism , slides Vijay S. Pai and Samuel Midkiff
10:50 - 11:10	Concurrency, Intuition and Formal Verification: Yes, We Can! , slides Jan B. Pedersen and Peter H. Welch
11:10 - 11:30	A Language-oriented Approach to Teaching Concurrency , slides Tom Van Cutsem, Stefan Marr, and Wolfgang De Meuter
11:30 - 12:00	Discussion of morning papers
12:00-1:30	Lunch
1:30 - 2:05	Tool-based Approach to Teaching Parallel and Concurrent Programming, slides Caitlin Sadowski, Ganesh Gopalakrishnan, Thomas Ball, Joseph Mayo, Shaz Qadeer, Sebastian Burckhardt, Madanlal Musuvathi, Judith Bishop, and Stephen Toub
2:05 - 2:25	DrHabanero - a Platform for Parallel Software Education in Java,slides Robert Cartwright and Vivek Sarkar
2:25 - 3:00	Early and often: Bringing more parallelism into undergraduate Computer Science Richard Brown, Elizabeth Shoop, Joel Adams, Curtis Clifton, Mark Gardner, and Michael Haupt shared with Towards a community of Computer Science educators who teach more parallelism,slides Elizabeth Shoop, Peter Hinsbeeck, and Richard Brown
3:00-3:30	Afternoon Break
3:30-5:00	Hot Topics
	Vijay Saraswat
	Stein Gjessing

Program Committee

• Kim Bruce, Pomona College (co-chair)
• Vijay Saraswat, IBM (co-chair)
• Guy Blelloch, CMU
• Daniel Ernst, University of Wisconsin, Eau Claire
• Shriram Krishnamurthi, Brown University
• Tim Mattson, Intel
• Michael Scott, University of Rochester
• Guy Steele, Oracle