Teaching an engineering approach for network computing

Parallelism and concurrency have long been considered as non essential during the cursus of the average programmer. However, thanks to technological advances, new promising forms of parallel computing are now appearing, e.g. “network computing”, which are inexpensive and easy to use. In this paper, we present new points to focus on when teaching parallel computing, in addition to the basic principles of it, to let students be aware of problems that often arise when implementing parallel algorithms on this new architecture. Besides, we experimented a different type of exam mainly based on an exercise that had to be solved stepwise, putting the engineering students in a situation which is similar to their future job.

• Type: Conference
• Year: 1997
• Where: SIGCSE
• Authors: Eric Dillon, Carlos Gamboa Dos Santos, Jacques Guyard
• Keywords: Average Programmer, Education, Parallel Computing, SIGCSE 1997, Technological Advances