Teaching parallel and distributed computing in a single undergraduate-level course

Abstract

As the application of parallel distributed computing (PDC) becomes ever more pervasive, it is increasingly important that undergraduate CS curricula expose students to a wide range of PDC topics in order to prepare them for the workforce. We present the curricular design and learning goals of an upper-level undergraduate course that covers a wide breadth of topics in parallel and distributed computing, while also providing students with depth of experience and development of problem solving, programming, and analysis skills. We discuss lessons learned from our experiences teaching this course over 15 years, and we discuss changes and improvements we have made in its offerings, as well as choices and trade-offs we made to achieve a balance between breadth and depth of coverage across these two huge fields. Evaluations from students support that our approach works well meeting the goals of exposing students to a broad range of PDC topics, building important PDC thinking and programming skills, and meeting other pedagogical goals of an advanced upper-level undergraduate CS course. Although initially designed as a single course due to constraints that are common to smaller schools, our experiences with this course lead us to conclude that it is a good approach for an advanced undergraduate course on PDC at any institution.