Curricula for concurrency and parallelism

Abstract

The concurrency era has exploded on us. Multicore systems are now everywhere in our laptops, desktops, graphic cards, video game consoles. Symmetric multi-processors and clusters dominate the server and high performance computing market and are the foundation for cloud computing. There is an urgent need to ensure that newly trained Computer Science graduates are well versed in the principles and practice of concurrent and parallel programming. Hence there is a growing groundswell of interest in revisiting undergraduate and graduate curricular design issues around concurrency (e.g. a session at the Microsoft/UW Concurrency Summit in August 08, an invited talk at PPoPP in February 08, a workshop of invited speakers at ASPLOS in March 09). This workshop aims to bring together practitioners and thinkers to address this topic. It will be organized around the presentation of position papers selected by the PC, and a panel discussion. The results of the workshop will be made available online.