Overview: In this era of pervasive multicore machines, GPUs, cloud services, big data, machine learning, and the Internet of Things, the CDER center has been working over a decade to infuse parallel and distributed computing (PDC) concepts into undergraduate computing curricula, with clear implications for national security, R&D, and workforce and economic development. Sponsored by this institute planning grant, CDER conducted an extensive stakeholder community input study to identify underlying impediments and to formulate the key attributes of an institute to help eliminate the longstanding barrier of the sequential computing paradigm. The breadth and complexity of the task and the scale of its impact justify the need for an institute-level investment to bring computing curricula into the 21st century.  

The Problem: Modern computing systems pervasively employ PDC, which new computer science and engineering, and related computing disciplines, are not prepared to work with, according to multiple stakeholder groups (national labs and agencies, including DoD and DOE, and industry). Recent graduates do not understand the modern software development ecosystem, which relies on parallelism, distribution, asynchrony, scaling, integration across disparate libraries and data sources, data-driven intelligence, test-driven design, and pervasive concerns for security.

This lack of preparation causes a competitive disadvantage vis-a-vis other countries that address the problem (including China, India, and Russia). Affected areas include national security (cybersecurity, intelligence analysis, cyber warfare, defense systems), research and development (high performance computing, data science, AI, and in critical applications such as pharmaceuticals, advanced materials, climate forecasting, and chip design), and the economy (high onboarding cost of graduates, computing infrastructure, energy systems, e-commerce, and healthcare).

Methods: This project gathered input from a diverse set of stakeholders to guide a vision for a large-scale effort to comprehensively work with the identified actors, factors, and strategies to achieve transformative change. The gathering happened through three stakeholder input workshops (Nov?21@SC, Mar?20@SIGCSE, and Jul?20) and a fourth institute design workshop (Mar?21), each supported by thirty to fifty stakeholders.  A final reporting-out workshop to NSF and other federal agencies was held in Fall 2021 in Alexandria, VA.  

The first workshop, which focused on PDC practitioners, identified important factors inhibiting introduction of PDC in the curriculum, strategies to address these factors, and actors for implementing them. The second workshop primarily interfaced with educators, identifying more specific factors and actors in that ecosystem. The third workshop focused on leaders across the industry, labs, and academia, and their synergy with academia. The fourth workshop examined the lessons learnt from the previous workshops, and considered the design of the institute itself, its mission, strategies, and activities. We organized our final reporting-out workshop in a hybrid mode to ensure attendance by as many program directors from NSF and other agencies as possible. 

Solution: The model of computation used to introduce students to the concepts and approaches of computational problem solving needs to be updated to reflect modern PDC systems, tools, methods, algorithms, use cases, datasets, and threats. It will take a significant investment to overcome inertia in the education system and to change expectations of employers and accreditation boards. Funding is needed to incentivize pioneering efforts to develop exemplar courses and curricula in a diverse set of institutions. This set must be large enough to create a critical mass of change and a bandwagon effect across computing disciplines. This also opens up an opportunity for curriculum-based rethinking around broadening participation in computing. The pioneering efforts need to be coordinated to produce approaches that are sufficiently coherent to create a new standard for accreditation and advanced placement.  

In addition to curriculum development teams, there is a need for a centralized repository of developed materials, curated to ensure quality and portability. As exemplars are developed, there must be an effort to transfer them to new institutions, to evaluate their effectiveness in different contexts, which also necessitates investment in training and support for adoption. The need for student-friendly software, turnkey environments, and broad dissemination implies centralized technical support during the pioneering and transfer phases. An outreach team is needed to shift employer expectations, foster collaborative partnerships, and work with standards organizations. Equally important is a need for a marketing team to continually assess stakeholder needs, provide input to other efforts, and promote the benefits to each stakeholder community.  

Conclusion: It is clear that an incremental or piecemeal approach has not worked. The needed transformative effort requires a major institute to provide the necessary coordination, well-structured services, and focal point to ensure success. The expected benefit of this investment is a modernized computing workforce that restores and maintains competitiveness of the US with respect to national defense, R&D, and cyberinfrastructure in support of scientific, social, and commercial goals. The savings to the US economy will provide an annual return on the investment that will be four orders of magnitude greater than the cost of the program.

Last Modified: 06/22/2023
Modified by: Sushil K Prasad