First Workshop on Curricula in Concurrency and Parallelism OOPSLA 2009

http://concurrencypedagogy.ning.com/

Important Dates:

• Submission deadline for position papers: August 30, 2009
• Notification of decision: September 14, 2009
• Workshop Date: Monday, October 26
• Submit by mail to vijay at saraswat.org

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. Following a previous successful workshop on Multicore Programming Education at ASPLOS 2009, this workshop will address several fundamental questions:

• What are the ``fundamental ideas'' of concurrency and parallelism that every Computer Science graduate should know? That every college graduate should know?
• Should concurrency and parallelism be taught ``top-down'' (via high-level abstractions such as operations on collections) or bottom up (with low-level tools such as threads and locks)?
• Should sequential programming be taught as a ``special case'' of concurrent and parallel programming?
• Should concurrency and parallelism issues be addressed in introductory computer science courses?
• Should concurrency and parallelism topics be ``sprinkled'' in existing courses (e.g. in architecture, systems, programming languages, algorithms) -- if so which topics in those courses should be taken out to make room? Should these topics be taught in their own separate stream?

This workshop aims to bring together practitioners and thinkers to address this topic. In keeping with OOPSLA traditions, we seek a diverse group of participants -- educators, researchers, practitioners, students, authors -- with varied background, experience and approaches, for what we hope will be a stimulating discussion. 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 at http://concurrencypedagogy.ning.com

Potential participants are invited to submit 2-page position papers addressing these topics, for consideration by the Program Committee. Please submit by email to vijay at saraswat.org

The paper should address the authors' experience and thoughts on this topic, and raise questions that they would like to see discussed at the workshop. In the case of educators we are particularly interested in understanding how your academic department is organizing as a whole to address these pedagogical issues.

Program Committee

• Guy Blelloch, Carnegie-Mellon University
• Kim Bruce, Pomona College
• Shriram Krishnamurthi, Brown University
• Tim Mattson, Intel Corporation
• Vijay Saraswat, IBM Corporation (co-chair)
• Michael L. Scott, University of Rochester
• Guy L. Steele, Jr Sun Microsystems (co-chair)
• Kathy Yelick, UC Berkeley and NERSC