| NSF Org: |
CNS Division Of Computer and Network Systems |
| Recipient: |
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| Initial Amendment Date: | August 20, 2012 |
| Latest Amendment Date: | September 21, 2018 |
| Award Number: | 1205650 |
| Award Instrument: | Standard Grant |
| Program Manager: |
Sylvia Spengler
sspengle@nsf.gov (703)292-7347 CNS Division Of Computer and Network Systems CSE Directorate for Computer and Information Science and Engineering |
| Start Date: | September 1, 2012 |
| End Date: | February 28, 2019 (Estimated) |
| Total Intended Award Amount: | $754,771.00 |
| Total Awarded Amount to Date: | $1,209,727.00 |
| Funds Obligated to Date: |
FY 2018 = $150,954.00 |
| History of Investigator: |
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| Recipient Sponsored Research Office: |
58 EDGEWOOD AVE NE ATLANTA GA US 30303-2921 (404)413-3570 |
| Sponsor Congressional District: |
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| Primary Place of Performance: |
G-76 Alumni Hall 30 Courtland St Atlanta GA US 30302-3999 |
| Primary Place of
Performance Congressional District: |
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| Unique Entity Identifier (UEI): |
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| Parent UEI: |
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| NSF Program(s): |
CYBERINFRASTRUCTURE, CCRI-CISE Cmnty Rsrch Infrstrc, CI-TEAM, TUES-Type 2 Project, Software & Hardware Foundation |
| Primary Program Source: |
01001213RB NSF RESEARCH & RELATED ACTIVIT 01001819DB NSF RESEARCH & RELATED ACTIVIT 04001213DB NSF Education & Human Resource |
| Program Reference Code(s): |
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| Program Element Code(s): |
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| Award Agency Code: | 4900 |
| Fund Agency Code: | 4900 |
| Assistance Listing Number(s): | 47.070 |
ABSTRACT
Computing increasingly permeates daily lives, yet few appreciate the growing presence of Parallel and Distributed Computing (PDC) in common computing activities; e.g., modern laptops' processors contain multiple cores and special-purpose devices such as graphics processors (GPUs). With increasing availability of powerful PDC technology, familiarity with single-processor computers and sequential computing no longer constitutes computer literacy. Technological developments point to the need for a broad-based skill set in PDC at all levels of higher education in disciplines such as Computer Science, Computer Engineering, and the related computational disciplines. The rapid changes in technology challenge educators to decide what to teach and how to teach it. Students and employers face similar challenges in characterizing "basic" expertise in computing. The PIs are addressing these challenges via a project devoted to creating and sustaining curricular and educational infrastructure to facilitate the teaching of PDC topics in undergraduate computer-related curricula. The goal is for every graduating student to become skilled in PDC technology, hence be prepared to enter tomorrow's workforce.
The project embodies multiple synergistic activities that develop: flexible PDC curricula for a spectrum of academic programs and institutions; mechanisms that help individuals maintain currency; instructional materials for PDC-related topics; experience-based guidelines for injecting PDC into curricula. A signature activity is competitions for early adopters of PDC curricula (winners receive seed funds, equipment donations from industry) and workshops and training sessions to foster awareness and adoption of PDC curricula. Feedback from early adopters and coordination with the ACM/IEEE 2013 CS Curriculum Taskforce steers future development of both the PDC curricular guidelines and of strategies for deploying PDC material within computing curricula at a larger scale.
This project is supported by CISE, OCI, and EHR/DUE.
PUBLICATIONS PRODUCED AS A RESULT OF THIS RESEARCH
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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.
Vision: Parallel and Distributed Computing (PDC) now permeates most computing activities. The ubiquity of computing devices containing multicore processors and graphics processors (GPUs), along with the rapidly growing importance of data science and machine learning, are making most users dependent on parallel processing. Increasing use of web-based services, cloud computing, and the Internet of Things, is weaving distributed computing into the fabric of modern society. Thus, we face significant challenges for transforming computer science (CS) and computer engineering (CE) education to prepare students to enter the 21st century workforce.
NSF/IEEE-TCPP Curriculum Guidelines: As background preparation, a planning workshop funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF) was held in February 2010, in Washington, DC. The primary task identified was to propose a set of core topics in parallel and distributed computing for undergraduate curricula for CS and CE students. A series of weekly/biweekly tele-meetings was begun in May 2010; the series continued through December 2010. The goal of the series of meetings was to propose a PDC core curriculum for CS/CE undergraduates, with the premise that every CS/CE undergraduate should achieve a specified skill level regarding PDC-related topics as a result of required coursework. A preliminary version of the proposed core curriculum was released in December 2010. We sought early adopters of the curriculum for spring and fall terms of 2011 and 2012 in order to get a preliminary evaluation of our proposal. The version I document was released in Dec 2012 (http://www.cs.gsu.edu/~tcpp/curriculum/index.php), a revised version of the preliminary report based on interactions with the early adopters and varied stakeholders. In the three main PDC sub-areas of Architecture, Programming, and Algorithms, plus a fourth sub-area composed of Cross-cutting or Advanced Issues, the working group deliberated upon various topics and subtopics and their level of coverage, identified where in current core courses these could be introduced and provided examples of how they might be taught.
Impact on Professional Curriculum Standards: The CS2013 ACM/IEEE Computer Science Curriculum Joint Task Force has recognized the need to integrate PDC topics in the early core courses in the CS/CE curriculum and collaborated with us leveraging our curriculum. The CS2013 curriculum released in Spring-14 explicitly refers to the NSF/TCPP curriculum for comprehensive coverage of parallelism (and provides a direct hyperlink). ABET/CSAB now has a new parallelism requirement, and we have initiated collaborations.
Fostering Community and Adoption: The enthusiastic reception of the TCPP guidelines has led to a commitment within the working group to continue to develop the guidelines and to foster their adoption at an even broader range of academic institutions. Toward these ends, the NSF-supported Center for Curriculum Development and Educational Resources (CDER) was founded through this grant. Adoption and reviews have since been carried out continually by selected stakeholders. Funded primarily by NSF and supported by Intel for international adoption, a total of 141 early adopter institutions worldwide, selected via competitions held in Spring-11 through Fall-15 have been employing and evaluating the proposed curriculum. NVIDIA has donated GPU cards to some early adopters. EduPar series has continued with EduPar19 just held in Rio, Brazil. Another workshop was initiated at SC-13 (EduHDC-13) in Denver, the first such workshop at SC. It was followed up by the EduHPC-14 through EduHPC-18 in Dallas. A Euro-EduPar workshop series was initiated at EuroPar-15, and has been held thrice, the latest in Turin at EuroPar-18. A new venture has been seeding the EduHiPC workshop in conjunction with the HiPC conference in India in December 2018.
Curriculum Update: CDER center alongside a new working group has been engaged in revising the 2012 TCPP curricular guidelines during 2016-19, especially incorporating aspects of Big Data, Energy, Distributed Computing, and Cross-cutting foundational topics as well as developing and curating Course, Curriculum, and Topic Exemplars. We announced a revised draft in May 2019 at EduPar 2019 in Rio, Brazil. This is undergoing review by external experts.
CDER has initiated several complementary activities.
(1) CDER Courseware Repository: http://www.cs.gsu.edu/~tcpp/curriculum/?q=courseware\_management
(2) CDER Compute Cluster for early adopters and their students: upgraded in Fall?18 with additional GPUs and Spark environment has 656 cores, 1 TB RAM, four GPUs, including NVIDIA V100s (free access: https://grid.cs.gsu.edu/~tcpp/curriculum/?q=node/21615)
(3) CDER book project: (i) "Topics in Parallel and Distributed Computing: Introducing Concurrency in Undergraduate Courses", Fall 2015, in hardcopy and free preprint version at http://grid.cs.gsu.edu/~tcpp/curriculum/?q=cedr_book; 28,000 downloads. (ii) "Topics in Parallel and Distributed Computing: Enhancing the undergraduate curriculum - performance, concurrency, and programming on modern platforms", Fall 2018.
(4) JPDC journal special issue for 2015 and 2016 Edu* workshops papers resulted in two volumes in Fall-17 and Fall-18.
Last Modified: 06/12/2019
Modified by: Rajshekhar Sunderraman
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