Antonio J. Tomeu

Teaching concurrent and parallel programming by patterns

The use of programming patterns is considered to be a conceptual aid for programmers for developing understandable and testable concurrent and parallel code which is not only well built but also safe. By using programming patterns and their implementations as computer programs, difficult new concepts can be smoothly taught in lectures to students who before trying this teaching approach would have been reluctant to enroll on Parallel and Concurrent Programming courses. The approach presented in this paper consists in changing the traditional programming teaching and learning model to one where students are first introduced to syntactical constructs through selected introductory program code-patterns. In the theory lessons that follow, through the use of laptops with multi-core processors and access to the Virtual Campus services of our university, the students are easily able to implement and master the new concepts as they are taught. This teaching experiment was implemented to teach a concurrent and real-time programming course which is part of the computer engineering (CE) degree and taught during the third semester of the CE curriculum. Evaluation of the students academic performance when they had been taught with this approach revealed a 20.6% improvement in the students end-of-course grades. A new teaching model for undergraduate Parallel and Distributed Programming (PDC) courses which uses code-patterns.Assessment of students academic results compared with other courses on the same subject.More didactic PDC teaching based on shared resources from the outset.Petersons mutual exclusion and tumor growth simulation to introduce our approach.Set the fundamentals for developing our own self-study cloud courses and tools.

Parallel Cellular Automaton Tumor Growth Model

“In silico” experimentation allows us to simulate the effect of different therapies by handling model parameters. Although the computational simulation of tumors is currently a well-known technique, it is however possible to contribute to its improvement by parallelizing simulations on computer systems of many and multi-cores. This work presents a proposal to parallelize a tumor growth simulation that is based on cellular automata by partitioning of the data domain and by dynamic load balancing. The initial results of this new approach show that it is possible to successfully accelerate the calculations of a known algorithm for tumor-growth.

A Set of Patterns for Concurrent and Parallel Programming Teaching

The use of key parallel-programming patterns has proved to be extremely helpful for mastering difficult concurrent and parallel programming concepts and the associated syntactical constructs. The method suggested here consists of a substantial change of more traditional teaching and learning approaches to teach programming. According to our approach, students are first introduced to concurrency problems through a selected set of preliminar program code-patterns. Each pattern also has a series of tests with selected samples to enable students to discover the most common cases that cause problems and then the solutions to be applied. In addition, this paper presents the results obtained from an informal assessment realized by the students of a course on concurrent and real-time programming that belongs to the computer engineering (CE) degree. The obtained results show that students feel now to be more actively involved in lectures, practical lessons, and thus students make better use of their time and gain a better understanding of concurrency topics that would not have been considered possible before the proposed method was implemented at our University.

Teaching Software Transactional Memory in Concurrency Courses with Clojure and Java

In the field of concurrency and parallelism, it is known that the use of lock-based synchronization mechanisms limits the programming efficiency of concurrent applications and reveals problems in thread synchronization. Software Transactional Memory (STM) is a consolidated concurrency control mechanism that may be considered as an alternative to lock-based constructs for programming critical software, although STM is still not fully accepted as a programming model for the industry. It is our opinion that STM programming must be more emphasized in undergraduate courses on concurrency and parallelism. In this paper we propose an academic experience regarding the introduction of STM programming in concurrency courses by using the Clojure language as the common vehicle for teaching Concurrent Programming. Java, the most popular and extended programming language for teaching concurrency, becomes a second language in our course, and thus our students can take advantage of Clojure API which is defined in Java in order to simplify the development of programming, lectures and assignments.