Incorporating parallelism and high performance computing into computer science courses

This work describes research, efforts, and outcomes for several Computer Science courses after incorporating XSEDE High Performance Computing (HPC) Resources and recommended and required curriculum additions from the ACM 2013 Computer Science Curricula and IEEE Technical Committee on Parallel Processing Curriculum Guidelines. The work herein describes the courses affected by this work, including Computer Organization (44-345), Operating Systems (44-550), Software Engineering I and II (44-561/2), and Parallel Programming (44-599) - undergraduate and cross-listed courses at Northwest Missouri State University. Guidance for novel content in these courses was drawn from the ACM/IEEE CS 2013 Curricula and from recent research on HPC education. As recommended by the curricula guidelines, topics in parallelism were incorporated into many required Computer Science courses. Therefore, an analysis of contact hours devoted to parallelism in required CS courses at Northwest is also included. Results, based upon student surveys from the Operating Systems (OS) course and course reviews, indicate student interest and success in students having learned key topics in parallelism. Particular emphasis was placed on incorporating parallel computing topics into the OS course.