After decades of sturm und drang over whether or not to include parallelism in the undergraduate computer science curriculum, we can announce definitively that battle is over. Parallelism is here, and it already abides.
Fortunately, we are not left staring into the abyss. Academia, Industry and Developers are cooperating to help define what the new landscape (or seascape) should look like. While the details are still coming into focus, certain aspects now dominate the discussion:

• We should get beyond thinking about teaching “parallel programming” — it’s all just programming.
• Parallelism must be introduced early into the curriculum – no later than second year, and it must inform all relevant courses.
• New focus must be paid to architecture – but not the same architecture we’ve been teaching for years.
• Design patterns will take on increasing importance.
• Parallel models are no longer in their infancy – some are mature and can be widely adopted.
• Hiring managers are looking for general knowledge of parallelism more than specific tool sets.
• As educators, we must prepare our students to make the decisions that industry demands – the tools, models, and patterns will lead our way forward.

Agree? Disagree? Good.
We’re going to be having a conversation about this at the IDF education panel “Navigating in a Sea of Cores” on Monday, September 13th. We have representatives from industry and from academia on the panel, and expect to have a lively discussion there continuing through lunch afterwards.

http://idfcommunity.intel.com/planner/SessionCatalog.aspx?track=(ACA).

Free passes are available to educators -Enter the code ACAWEB1 when you register.

For those of you who can’t attend, or for those who want to dry-lab the discussion, we’re also going to have a series of blog posts by some of the contributors. We’ll also be adding links to those further discussions here, so you can just check back to keep up to date!

. Read the rest at Intel.com.