EduPar 2016 - 6th NSF/TCPP Workshop on Parallel and Distributed Computing Education (EduPar-16)

Parallel and Distributed Computing (PDC) now permeates most computing activities. The pervasiveness of computing devices containing multicore CPUs and GPUs, including home and office PCs, laptops, and mobile devices, is making even common users dependent on parallel processing. Certainly, it is no longer sufficient for even basic programmers to acquire only the traditional sequential programming skills. The preceding trends point to the need for imparting a broad-based skill set in PDC technology at various levels in the educational fabric woven by Computer Science (CS) and Computer Engineering (CE) programs as well as related computational disciplines. However, the rapid changes in computing hardware platforms and devices, languages, supporting programming environments, and research advances, more than ever challenge educators in knowing what to include in the curriculum and what to teach in any given semester or course.
The 6th workshop on Parallel and Distributed Computing Education invites unpublished manuscripts from individuals or teams from academia, industry, and other educational and research institutes on topics pertaining to the teaching of PDC topics in the Computer Science and Engineering curriculum as well as in Computational Science and with PDC and high performance computing (HPC) concepts. The emphasis of the 5th workshop continues to be on undergraduate education, although certain aspects of graduate education, if relevant to undergraduates, may be considered at the discretion of the program committee. The workshop especially seeks papers that report on experience with implementing aspects of the NSF/TCPP or ACM/IEEE CS2013 curriculum or other novel approaches to incorporating PDC topics into undergraduate core courses that are taken by the majority of students in a program. Methods, pedagogical approaches, tools, and techniques that have the potential for adoption across the broader community are of particular interest.
This effort is in coordination with the TCPP curriculum initiative (http://www.cs.gsu.edu/~tcpp/curriculum/index.php) for CS/CE undergraduates supported by NSF and its NSF-supported Center for Parallel and Distributed Computing Curriculum Development and Educational Resources (CDER).
The topics of interest include, but are not limited to:
1. Pedagogical issues in PDC
2. Novel ways of teaching PDC topics, including informal learning environments
3. Models for incorporating PDC topics in core CS/CE curriculum
4. Experience with incorporating PDC topics into core CS/CE courses
5. Experience with incorporating PDC topics in the context of other applications learning
6. Pedagogical tools, programming environments, and languages for PDC