Introducing undergraduates to parallel processing

Parallelism in many forms exists in all systems. Many facets of parallelism can be usefully and practically introduced in a one semester class, on parallel processing. Such a class, based on inexpensive hardware, is described in the context of core material preceding, elective material following, and supplemental material paralleling. The elements of this introduction are a single semester of these streams which examine specialized computing architectures, a specific multiple-instruction multiple-data (MIMD) machine and its assembly language, and a laboratory for programming the MIMD hardware. A brief analysis is made of some of the assignments given over the past six years in an undergraduate elective for computer systems engineers and computer scientists