Experiences of Teaching Parallel Computing to Undergraduates and Post-Graduates

Abstract

In this paper, we present teaching experiences of offering a course on large-scale parallel computing using message passing interface (MPI). This particular course was offered to under-graduates and graduates for the first time in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering, Indian Institute of Technology Kanpur in a very long time. We will present what topics were covered, how we decided the course content, the class demographics, what resources were made available for the students to run their MPI jobs and discuss the output of the course. We will also discuss what were the stumbling blocks encountered while offering a parallel computing systems course without much support from teaching assistants, and some lessons that we took forward to the next time we offered this course.