Teaching Parallel, Distributed and High Performance Computing: experiences, Tools and Technologies

Thursday 28 June 2018, 9:00 – 11:00

Room: Conference Room

Parallel and Distributed Computing (PDC), High Performance Computing (HPC) and Cloud Computing (CC), become more and more pervasive. Today, these architectures are presents in our super computers, servers, desktops/laptops and mobile devices. Even casual users of computers now depend on parallel processing. Teaching only traditional, sequential programming is no longer adequate ; it is important for every programmer (and even computer user) to understand how parallelism and distributed computing affect problem solving.

For this reason, it is essential to impart a range of PDC, HPC and CC knowledge and skills at different levels of university curricula (bachelor, master and PhD). However, rapid changes in hardware platforms, languages, programming environments, and advances in research increasingly challenge educators to decide what to teach and how to teach it, in order to prepare students for their careers in technology.

This workshop will be a meeting place for several PDC, HPC and CC teaching experiments in different universities. The idea is to explore the possibilities of “replicating” practical experiences carried out in different universities and to define a framework which could be used to exchange expertise’s, learned lessons and tools.

The workshop is organised as follow:

• 9:00 – 10:00 (short presentations):
  • Teaching parallel computing and HPC at the University of Geneva, Bastien Chopard & Jean-Luc Falcone, University of Geneva
  • Application Performance Management for business critical, distributed services, Nabil Ouerhani, University of Applied Sciences and Arts, Western Switzerland (HES-SO)
  • Interactive Machine Learning with Jupyter notebooks on a GPU accelerated HPC cluster, Mykhailo Vladymyrov and Sigve Haug, University of Bern
  • HPC or Cloud Computing: Mapping your application to the right environment, Zina Ben Miled, Indiana University – Purdue University Indianapolis.
  • Teaching Cloud – A hands-on approach, Marcel Graf, University of Applied Sciences and Arts, Western Switzerland (HES-SO)
  • Teaching HPC and Fault-Tolerance through Matrix-Matrix Multiplication, Florina M. Ciorba and Aurélien Cavelan, University of Basel.
  • An Introduction to Fundamentals of Parallel Computing at University of Southern Indiana, Srishti Srivastava, University of Southern Indiana
• 10:00 – 11:00: Round table: Teaching PDC, HPC and CC: experiences, tools and technology