EduPar 2019 - 9th NSF/TCPP Workshop on Parallel and Distributed Computing Education (EduPar-19)

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 most users dependent on parallel processing. The ever increasing use of web-based services and emerging applications, such as cloud computing and the Internet of Things, is weaving distributed computing into the fabric of modern society. This raises important questions in adapting education to prepare students for addressing the challenges of current and emerging computing technologies.
Certainly, it is no longer sufficient for even basic programmers to acquire only the traditional sequential programming skills. Technological trends point to the need for imparting a broad-based skill set in PDC at various levels in the educational fabric woven into Computer Science (CS) and Computer Engineering (CE) programs, as well as in related computational disciplines. However, the rapid changes in computing hardware platforms and devices, languages, supporting programming environments, and research advances present immense challenges to educators in deciding what to include in the curriculum and what to teach in any given semester or course.
EduPar provides a global forum for exploring new ideas and experiences related to a seamless inclusion of PDC topics in a CS/CE and related curricula primarily at undergraduate levels, but also at K-12 and graduate levels, and in informal settings. To provide some historical perspective, since 2011, EduPar has been held successfully against the backdrop of the IPDPS, a major conference focusing on parallel and distributed computing. This effort is in coordination with the TCPP curriculum initiative (http://www.cs.gsu.edu/~tcpp/curriculum) for CS/CE undergraduates supported by NSF and its NSF-supported Center for Parallel and Distributed Computing Curriculum Development and Educational Resources (CDER).
EduPar invites unpublished manuscripts from individuals or teams from academia, industry, and other educational and research institutes from all over the world on topics pertaining to the teaching of PDC topics in the Computer Science and Computer Engineering curriculum as well as in domain-specific computational and data science and engineering curricula. The topics of interest are as follows:
• Emerging PDC topics to inform TCPP and related curricula
• Curriculum design and models for incorporating PDC topics in core curricula, including in CS1/CS2 courses and in Computer Science Principles and other courses at K-12 level
• Parallel and distributed models of programming/computation suitable for teaching, learning and workforce development
• Experience with incorporating PDC topics into core courses
• Experience with incorporating PDC topics in the context of other applications
• Pedagogical issues in incorporating PDC in undergraduate and graduate education, especially in core courses
• Novel ways of teaching PDC topics, including informal learning environments
• Pedagogical tools, programming environments, infrastructures, languages and projects for PDC
• Educational resources based on higher level programming languages such as PGAS, X10, Chapel, Haskell, Python and Cilk, and emerging environments such as CUDA, OpenCL, OpenACC, and Hadoop
• e-Learning, e-Laboratory, Massive Open Online Courses (MOOC), Small Private Online Courses (SPOC)
• PDC experiences at non-university levels; secondary school, postgraduate, industry, diffusion of PDC
• Employers’ experiences with and expectation of the level of PDC proficiency among new graduates