This collaborative project represents a multi-faceted effort to shift computer science and engineering education toward ensuring that students can use 21st century platforms that pervasively incorporate parallel and distributed computing (PDC). Twentieth century computers were mostly designed around a single processor, executing a sequence of operations. But this century is characterized by widespread deployment of multi-core, graphics, and AI tensor processors, as well as a shift to cloud servers, and the internet of things, all of which depend on the much different PDC approach to problem solving and programming. Financial, technical, scientific, engineering and medical companies, government labs, the department of defense, the intelligence community, and many other sectors are desperately seeking employees who can exploit PDC systems, because the existing workforce was heavily steeped in the old model. Yet most students continue to learn the old approach due to significant inertia in academia. To turn the tide toward infusing PDC into the early stages of computer science and engineering education, this project will guide curricula and accreditation standards, prepare teachers, and foster a strong PDC education community. It will thus strategically serve the national interest, as stated by NSF's mission: to promote the progress of science; to advance the national health, prosperity and welfare; and to secure the national defense. It will be a significant step toward modernizing the emerging workforce to have the computing skills needed for the United States to maintain leadership in all of these areas.
The Center for Parallel and Distributed Computing Curriculum Development and Educational Resources (CDER) is preparing the 2020 update of their 2013 curriculum guidelines for introducing parallel and distributed computing (PDC) into early undergraduate courses. This project will engage in four areas of activity to foster adoption of the curriculum, and extend it, with the goal of modernizing computer science and engineering workforce development. One major thrust is running summer training workshops for teachers, to learn both PDC concepts and experimental course evaluation methodology. The discipline is still in a phase of discovery with respect to PDC education approaches, and must encourage a diverse set of well-designed experiments to test and evaluate a broad range of pedagogical hypotheses. The workshop participants will be drawn from a diverse pool of educators, and given curriculum development grants in support of experimental course offerings and evaluation, leading to conference or journal publications, as well as contributions of exemplars to the CDER online course materials repository. A second effort is to help ABET/CSAB to formulate core PDC requirements and to inform/train ABET/CSAB evaluators (CSAB is the lead society within ABET for accreditation of degree programs in computer science). A third effort is expanding the curriculum guidelines to explicitly address adding PDC to computer engineering programs, which present novel curricular opportunities. Lastly, it will continue CDER's successes in organizing PDC education workshops in conjunction with major conferences, publishing PDC education books and journal special issues, maintaining and curating an online repository of PDC education resources, and providing free access to a publicly available PDC education cluster system.
This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.
