HPCwire: Intel Brings Parallel Computing to High School

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July 30, 2009

Intel Brings Parallel Computing to High School

by John E. West, for HPCwire

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Earlier this month Intel announced it was helping lead a parallel programming experience for high school students. The three-day "Clubhouse Parallel Universe Boot-Camp" was held at Brooklyn Technical High School (BTHS). This idea is consistent with Intel's overall drive to help develop the expertise that applications developers -- and ultimately users -- need to get the most out of the company's chips. There is a clear business driver here, but in this case, the business driver lines up well with the broader societal goals of enabling users and developers to do more with technology.

The project started with Jeffrey Birnbaum from the Bank of America. Birnbaum has lots of experience working on lock-free and parallel programming techniques for "low latency high throughput messaging systems" of the kind you find in finance. Birnbaum's idea started with interactions he had with a high school student interested in parallel programming, and he saw an opportunity to start at the high school level to teach students to "think parallel."

"If students start thinking parallel when they are first introduced to software development, it opens the door to new creative solutions that more experienced programmers might not attempt. In essence, the student minds have not been spoiled by old serial programming methodologies and experimentation when multi-core multi-socket systems did not exist," says Birnbaum. "We are at the beginning of a new age in programming where the exploitation of advanced multi socket multicore systems to solve new and interesting problems requires developers who combine a "think parallel" mindset with the skill to execute."

Birnbaum hooked up with Intel's Bob Chesebrough, and they got together to implement the vision in the pilot program at BTHS. Fifteen students participated in the first workshop that wrapped up last week, and they wrote real code on hardware donated by Intel, IBM, and BLADE Network Technologies.

I think these kinds of efforts are tremendously important for the future of our community. Intel's Head Software Evangelist, James Reinders, took part in the event and gave me some time over email to answer a few questions.

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HPCwire: Why target high schoolers? Parallel programming has traditionally been left to college. Are the students ready to grasp the concepts?

James Reinders: Because they are ready to learn it as they learn programming, there is no reason to wait. Of all the programmers, these are the ones that will be doing parallel programming their entire careers. Virtually every new computer is ready for parallel programming -- multicore processors are everywhere now. So, programming is parallel programming -- it is fundamental.

I'd say parallel programming in the past has been a graduate level activity because parallel programming has been a niche. It was not graduate level because it is too hard -- it was graduate level because the machines to programming in parallel were scarce, and the topic affected only a minority of programmers. Now that it is fundamental, it is time to introduce early on in learning about programming. It should be part of teaching computer programming, not tacked on afterwards.

My first languages were assembly and BASIC. Neither taught structured programming nor data structures particularly. My professors whined about getting students that needed to be re-taught -- some said it was worse than having us come in knowing nothing. I'm not sure I agree -- but it's absolutely true that teaching minds that are uncluttered has advantages.

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