Teaching Parallel Computing with OpenMP on the Raspberry Pi (Abstract Only)

Parallel computing is one of the new knowledge units in the ACM/IEEE CS 2013 curriculum recommendations. This workshop will present the Raspberry Pi as an inexpensive hardware platform for providing each student with her own parallel processor. The tactile and visceral benefits of each student having her own machine and being able to take full advantage of its multicore capabilities are significant. In this hands-on workshop, we show how parallelism can be used to spread the workload of compute-intensive applications across the multiple cores of a Raspberry Pi, and explore its use as an inexpensive hardware platform for teaching parallel computing. CS educators who are interested in learning about parallel computing, OpenMP, and how to teach these concepts on a Raspberry Pi are encouraged to attend. Attendees will enjoy a hands-on hardware/software experience, exploring how parallel computations operate and work in practice. In Part I of the workshop, attendees will set up and explore a Raspberry Pi multi-core computer in small teams. In Part II, each team will use the parallel capabilities of the Raspberry Pi to explore parallel computation through the use of OpenMP "patternlets" published on CSinParallel.org. Part III explores applications of the Raspberry Pi to parallel applications such as image processing and population dynamics, using OpenMP. All materials from this workshop will be freely available from CSinParallel.org.