June/July in the Intel Academic Community

Now that classes are done for many of us, we can start turning our attention to research and training projects. This last month saw some really great activities in the Middle East; I’ll be highlighting a few of those.  I’ll  also be be talking about the debut of Intel Software Network TV, a powerful new vehicle for building our community and continuing the conversation on defining a  curriculum with parallelism at its core. Finally, take a look at our newly launched Academic Showcase and let us know what you think!

In this Blog:

• Teach Parallel!
• Academic Forums
• Community Blogs
• News from the Middle East
• News from the Americas
• Training Opportunities

Teach Parallel!

The Teach Parallel show is now available live and on demand via Intel Software Network TV Your humble Community Manager and Professor Tom Murphy of Contra Costa College co-host a weekly discussion on parallel computing and the undergraduate curriculum with academic Community members.

Join us live, Tuesdays at 10:00 AM PDT.

- June 30, 10am PDT. Dr. Scott Lathrop, Blue Waters Technical Program Manager for Education: HPC Centers can help support curricular change

- July 7, 10am PDT. Dr. Diane Baxter, Director of Education at the San Diego Supercomputer Center at UCSD. Education Outreach.

- July 14, 10am PDT. Kay Wanous, Recent Graduate, Earlham College: Students teaching Faculty

- July 28, 10am PDT. Dr. James Reinders, Intel Chief Software Evangelist: Intel Parallel Studio & parallelism in the classroom

- August 11, 10am PDT. David Patterson, Pardee Professor of Computer Science at the University of California at Berkeley: Parallelism in the Text: The new edition of Computer Organization and Design.

Academic Forums

Intel Academic Community training manager, Mike Pearce has added links to hardware architectural resources.  Take a look at these valuable resources, give Mike some feedback as to the utility of this information, and let us know what else you need.

Academic Community Blogs

Are you reading Intel Academic Community Blogs? Are you blogging yourself? We would welcome your contributions. If you are interested in blogging, please email me directly.

Intel Academic Community Blogs welcomes Professor Tom Murphy. His wide-ranging blogs take parallelism as the point of departure and continue to explore topics ranging from HPC to the discipline of computer science, to teaching, and points further.

News from the Middle East

Earlier this year, the Jordan University of Science and Technology (JUST) became the 1000th University to join the Intel Academic Community.  Now, in an unrelated, but significant notice, Intel announced that it was funding a multi-core laboratory at the university. Link

From Cairo Egypt, the Academic Community recently received some kind words from Dr. Mohamed Bakr Abdelhalim.  Shukran Ya Ustadh.  For more on Dr. Abdelhalim please see our community testimonials.

News from the Americas

Georgia Tech Instructor-Led-Training was well-attended with 14 faculties from the Historically Black Colleges or Universities.  Faculty from Clark Atlanta, Howard University, Spellman College, North Carolina A&T State University and Hampton University were in attendance.  See more here.

See an interview with Dr. Andrew Chien, VP of Intel Research at Research@Intel Day.  Andrew discusses the importance of supporting computing excellence and Intel’s sponsorship of the ACM’s AM Turing Award.  You can find information on future technologies research at www.intel.com/research.

Training Opportunities

Intel Training

Sign up for free multi-day, hands-on training on parallelism conducted by Intel and colleagues from the Academic Community. Find out where Intel is teaching this summer.

Supercomputing Education Summer 2009 Workshops

The Education Program is a multi-year, year-round program primarily designed to teach undergraduate faculty from a broad range of disciplines about high performance computing and computational methods, and to help them integrate these techniques into their classrooms. Find out more.

Other Training and event activities

· July 1, 2009 Intel® Parallel Studio at the Microsoft Seminar in the U.K. Learn “How to Write and Debug Parallel Code using Intel® Parallel Studio”

· August 3-7, 2009 SIGGRAPH (New Orleans, LA, USA) Join Intel in New Orleans for a focus on our products for graphics and animation.

· August 17-19, 2009 GDC Europe(Cologne, Germany)

· August 22-24, 2009 Intel Developer Forum (San Francisco, CA, USA)

· September 15-18, 2009 Austin Game Developer&aposs Conference (Austin, TX, USA)

URL: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/IntelBlogs/~3/QjUQl-EwJYc/

Sell software to SMBs in U.K., Germany, and France – Intel® Business Exchange

There is a sales opportunity for software partners who want to promote their products in Europe.

The Intel® Business Exchange software stores in U.K., Germany, and France have launched.

If you&aposre interested in selling downloadable software in Europe, find out how to enroll. For local distribution, we have enlisted the help of Avangate.

URL: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/IntelBlogs/~3/QgqzutdXU-E/

Collaboration: Intel, SEPARS, and ICSE 2009 (Vancouver, British Columbia)

Overview

Mike Wrinn and I (both of Intel) gave a joint, day-long session last month in parallel programming concepts, tools, and techniques in a planned, tight collaboration with Walter Tichy and Victor Pankratius, both of the University of Karlsruhe, Germany.  We gave this session (a combined lecture and hands-on workshop) during the week of the 31st International Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE) which was held May 16th through the 24th, 2009, in Vancouver, British Columbia.

You may or may not know that ICSE itself is an international, provocative, 21st century marvel of software talent, diversity, and enthusiasm.  There were over 1,100 registrations this year, and attendees chose sessions to attend from the hundreds available from four general tracks: research papers, research demonstrations, software engineering in practice (SEIP), and new ideas and emerging results (NEIR).

We are talking state of the art material here, from some of the sharpest software minds, companies, and universities on the planet: extremely interesting stuff.  (If you have never attended an ICSE, you really should someday…)

Walter, Victor, Mike and I worked for several months to create the abstract which ICSE was to ultimately accept and promote. A planned series of related morning lectures and afternoon hands-on labs, we were the highest-attended tutorial but also, ranked highest both in “buzz” at the convention and in actual pre-convention registrations.

While modesty might otherwise forbid, I mention this because it seems fairly clear that we did something right. Which is to say: when Intel employees partner with our fellow software community members? The results can be powerful!

Attend the tale…

 

The Plan

I was presenting at a Software Engineering for Parallel Systems (SEPARS) meeting last year in Stuttgart, Germany, the Intel perspective on “Just what do employers want  from graduates?” when I was approached by Victor Pankratius (and later, Walter Tichy) and asked if we might collaborate on something for ICSE 2009.

SEPARS is a working group and part of the Gesellschaft fuer Informatik e.V. (GI), the German Computer Science Society. Participation is open to everyone, and they explicitly seek interested people on an international level to participate. I’ve noted over the past year that one of their core interests is to encourage open and honest communication between members of academia and industry.  This is an excellent fit to Intel’s way of thinking, so, we got serious about a full-day event that would define the briefest possible overview of the substantial importance of parallel programming in today’s academic and industrial arenas, and, an inclusion of challenges and tools.

Anyway, we decided it was an excellent topic for an excellent venue. There was always a risk that ICSE wouldn’t pick us: but, we decided to give it a shot.

In case you’re not familiar with SEPARS, check them out:

http://www.multicore-systems.org/separs

 

The Implementation

Over the next few months we communicated steadily between Santa Clara, CA, USA, and Karlsruhe, Germany. Victor Pankratius stepped up to do most of the heavy lifting with regard to ICSE deadlines and abstracts. WAY TO GO, VICTOR! (He makes it look easy, actually.) After quite a few phone calls and emails and one convenient face to face meeting (Victor had business here in Santa Clara), we defined the details of all roles and content.  

Victor and Walter would handle the morning lecture sessions, one each, and Mike and I would handle the afternoon hands-on labs, also one each. The lectures and labs would be related of course, so the attendees got the concepts in the morning and practiced those concepts in the afternoon, on some fine hardware and state-of-the-art software tools.  Intel agreed to provide, implement, and ship the hardware – some fine dual-processor laptops – for the session. Allowing for a combination of some students who would prefer their own laptop and, others who would prefer to pair up, we had nice coverage.

Working with Victor and Walter was a dream, of course. They are extremely knowledgeable about modern parallel programming, and more specifically, about Intel’s powerful software tools.  The fit between their lecture and our labs was natural and spot on.

We submitted the abstract, and it was accepted. Further, a few months later, the actual registrations before the ICSE started were solid, and the session was solidified into the calendar. It was then that presentation at the event was “in stone” and we all made final reservations and preparations.

About three months had passed since our first meeting.

 

The Event

All the hardware showed up on time at ICSE, so the afternoon hands-on labs would happen per the plan. In the spirit of keeping things green, we had put all presentations and labs on RAM sticks, one per attendee (thus avoiding copying fees and piles of paper). Further: last minute changes were simple to make.

We started with 15 attendees in the morning, but by the end of the day there were 19 (always a good sign when the numbers increase).

Walter covered some important topics in lecture to get us started. He had picked the topic “The Multicore Software Challenge,” which of course covered paradigm shifts in computing, the evolution of parallel computers and CPUs, the role of parallelization, and of course, a listing of some of the basic challenges in parallel software writing.

Victor’s lecture was called “Transactional Memory versus Locks – A Comparative Case Study,” and included important topics such as the use of atomic transactions instead of explicit locks; a discussion of traditional prejudices against transactional memory; as well as a fascinating overview of case studies comparing the use of each methodology.

The afternoon labs, by Michael and me, covered OpenMP and Threading Methodologies. The students did a great job, and we went enough overtime with an informal “Birds of a Feather” session that I called that the meeting folks that had the room an hour after we were supposed to be done had to kick us out.  Fortunately, the ICSE staff helped us shutdown and break down the lab systems, and we were only in the way about 10 minutes total.

This was an excellent – if not very long – day!  

 

Results

Well as you can guess the feedback from the attendees about the tutorial experience was uniform in its praise. In fact ICSE itself hadn’t provided a tutorial feedback form, so we improvised one on the spot (literally, there was probably about 105 years of combined teaching experience between the four of us, so, no biggie) and printed it out for use.  Students reported:

• • “I liked everything! It was a superb tutorial.”
  • “I liked the hands-on session. Thanks to Intel and guys helping around.”
  • “Good overview.”
  • “I liked direct contact with the company that developed the tools.”
  • “I liked the mixture of theoretical introduction and practical exercises, and the course materials on USB stick.”
  • “I liked …kind of the hands-on stuff and playing around with actual tools.”
  • “I liked the organization of the tutorial, clear and to the point.”

We also got some great ideas for improvement, as well, as some attendees took our requests for that seriously, as we intended.

Since ICSE last month, we’ve received four related invitations to provide the same or a similar tutorial, including the ICSE management itselfasking us to strongly consider presenting again at ICSE 2010, which is in Capetown, South Africa.

Let me summarize: when we partner, we win. GREAT JOB, guys!

 

For more feedback on ICSE 2009 Vancouver, check it out:

 http://www.cs.uoregon.edu/events/icse2009/home/

 

URL: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/IntelBlogs/~3/p17QbP1GFHY/