Parallel thinking

Abstract

Assuming that the multicore revolution plays out the way the microprocessor industry expects, it seems that within a decade most programming will involve parallelism at some level. One needs to ask how this affects the the way we teach computer science, or even how we have people think about computation. With regards to teaching there seem to be three basic choices: (1) we only train a small number of experts in parallel computation who develop a collection of libraries, and everyone else just uses them; (2) we leave our core curriculum pretty much as is, but add some advanced courses on parallelism or perhaps tack on a few lectures at the end of existing courses; or (3) we start teaching parallelism from the start and embed it throughout the curriculum with the idea of getting students to think about parallelism as the most natural form of computation and sequential computation as a special case.