| NSF Org: |
IIS Division of Information & Intelligent Systems |
| Recipient: |
|
| Initial Amendment Date: | September 7, 2011 |
| Latest Amendment Date: | May 27, 2015 |
| Award Number: | 1143533 |
| Award Instrument: | Standard Grant |
| Program Manager: |
Sylvia Spengler
sspengle@nsf.gov (703)292-7347 IIS Division of Information & Intelligent Systems CSE Directorate for Computer and Information Science and Engineering |
| Start Date: | September 1, 2011 |
| End Date: | August 31, 2015 (Estimated) |
| Total Intended Award Amount: | $99,890.00 |
| Total Awarded Amount to Date: | $99,890.00 |
| Funds Obligated to Date: |
|
| History of Investigator: |
|
| Recipient Sponsored Research Office: |
58 EDGEWOOD AVE NE ATLANTA GA US 30303-2921 (404)413-3570 |
| Sponsor Congressional District: |
|
| Primary Place of Performance: |
G-76 Alumni Hall 30 Courtland St Atlanta GA US 30302-3999 |
| Primary Place of
Performance Congressional District: |
|
| Unique Entity Identifier (UEI): |
|
| Parent UEI: |
|
| NSF Program(s): | CSR-Computer Systems Research |
| Primary Program Source: |
01001112RB NSF RESEARCH & RELATED ACTIVIT |
| Program Reference Code(s): |
|
| Program Element Code(s): |
|
| Award Agency Code: | 4900 |
| Fund Agency Code: | 4900 |
| Assistance Listing Number(s): | 47.070 |
ABSTRACT
Parallel and Distributed Computing (PDC) now permeates most computing activities. The penetration of this technology in the daily lives has resulted in common users relying on its effectiveness and reliability. The mass marketing of multicores and general-purpose graphics processing units in home and office PCs and laptops has a potential for empowering even common users to become a technology contributor. Certainly, it is no longer sufficient for even basic programmers to acquire only the conventional programming skills. All this phenomena point to the need for imparting a broad-based skill set in parallel and distributed computing t various levels, impacting Computer Science (CS) and Computer Engineering (CE) programs and related computational disciplines. However, the rapid change in computing hardware platforms and devices, languages, and supporting programming environments, and the research advances, more than ever challenges the educators what to teach in any given semester. Students and their employer face similar challenges on what constitutes basic expertise. The proposed activity includes all stakeholder experts working together and periodically providing guidance on restructuring standard curriculum across various courses and modules related to parallel and distributed computing. Immediate benefit would be for CS/CE students and their instructors with periodic guidelines on what aspects to cover in what courses.
The PI plans to revise the preliminary version of the curriculum, and to hold a second round of competition for Fall-11 for early adopter status, supported by NSF and Intel. It is planned to have early adopter status competitions for Spring-12 and for Fall-12. EduPar-12 workshop to be organized at IPDPS-12 in Shanghai in May 2012, with expanded scope.
PROJECT OUTCOMES REPORT
Disclaimer
This Project Outcomes Report for the General Public is displayed verbatim as submitted by the Principal Investigator (PI) for this award. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this Report are those of the PI and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation; NSF has not approved or endorsed its content.
A curriculum working group from the IEEE Computer Society Technical Committee on Parallel Processing (TCPP), the National Science Foundation (NSF), and sister communities such as the ACM, has taken up proposing and refining a curriculum for computer science (CS) and computer engineering (CE) undergraduates on Parallel and Distributed Computing (PDC). The goal of this committee has been to propose a core curriculum for CS/CE undergraduates, with the premise that every such undergraduate should achieve a specified skill level regarding PDC-related topics as a result of required coursework. This project led to revision of the preliminary curriculum and release of the first version of the PDC curriculum in 2012 based on feedbacks of the early adopters and various stakeholders. It also helped with furthering the early adoption, holding related workshops and initiating educational resource creation.
Curriculum Initiative Website: http://grid.cs.gsu.edu/~tcpp/curriculum/?q=home
About 140 early adopter institutions worldwide, selected via competitions held in Spring-11, Fall-11, Spring-12, Fall-12 Fall-13, Fall-14, and Fall-15, have been employing and evaluating the proposed curriculum. Their feedback has been monitored and employed to update the curriculum, and a first formal version was released in Dec 2012. In 2011, a curriculum workshop, EduPar-11, was held at IPDPS-2011. This workshop formally presented the curriculum to the PDC community, had early adopters present their findings, and drafted a roadmap for follow up activities. We subsequently had EduPar-12 as a regular IPDPS workshop at Shanghai, China, EduPar-13 at IPDPS-13 in Boston and EduPar-14 at IPDPS-14 in Phoenix. We held the EduPar-15 workshop at IPDPS-15 in Hyderabad, India. A new education workshop has also been initiated at SC-13 (EduHPDC-13) in Denver, the first such workshop at SC. It was followed up by the EduHPC-14 workshop at SC-14 at New Orleans and EduHPC-15 workshop at SC-15 at Austin.
The CS2013 ACM/IEEE Computer Science Curriculum Joint Task Force has recognized the need to integrate parallel and distributed computing (PDC) topics in the early core courses in the computer science and computer engineering curriculum, and has collaborated with us leveraging our curriculum. The CS2013 curriculum released in Spring-14 explicitly refers to the TCPP curriculum for comprehensive coverage of parallelism.
Recognizing that both instructors and students of the lower level core courses need suitable textual material, a book project was initiated in Spring-13. Our book entitled “Topics in Parallel and Distributed Computing : Introducing Concurrency in Undergraduate Courses” has just been published by Elsevier in Sept 2015. A free preprint version of the book is available online at http://grid.cs.gsu.edu/~tcpp/curriculum/?q=cedr_book.
Another thrust has taken shape, which is a repository to collect and organize freely accessible pedagogical and instructional materials for teaching PDC curriculum topics. A website has been setup at http://www.cs.gsu.edu/~tcpp/curriculum/?q=courseware_management. All the early adopters have contributor level access to this site, and many have begun contributing.
Impact/benefits:
Through the curriculum, students and their instructors will receive periodic guidelines that identify aspects of PDC that are important to cover, and suggestions on specific core courses in which their coverage might find an appropriate context. New programs at colleges (nationally and internationally) w...
Please report errors in award information by writing to: awardsearch@nsf.gov.
