Facilitating the learning process in parallel computing by using instant messaging

Parallel Programming skills may require a long time to acquire. “Think in parallel” is a skill that requires time, effort, and experience. In this work, we propose to facilitate the students’ learning process in parallel programming by using instant messaging. Our aim was to find out whether students’ interaction through instant messaging tools is beneficial for the learning process. In order to do so, we asked several students of an HPC course of the Master’s degree in Computer Science of the University of León to develop a specific parallel application, each of them using a different application program interface: OpenMP, MPI, CUDA, or OpenCL. Even though the used APIs are different, there are common points in the design process. We encouraged students to interact with each other by using Gitter, an instant messaging tool for GitHub users. Our analysis of the communications and results demonstrate that the direct interaction of students through the Gitter tool has a positive impact on the learning process.

     

Assessing the individual acquisition of teamwork competence by exploring students’ instant messaging tools use: the WhatsApp case study

Universal Access in the Information Society - Nowadays, working in groups is very usual and popular in most professional environments. Thus, students, as potential workers, need to acquire teamwork...     

Exploratory study of introducing HPC to non-ICT researchers: institutional strategy is possibly needed for widespread adaption

The Journal of Supercomputing - Machine learning algorithms are becoming more and more useful in many fields of science, including many areas where computational methods are rarely used....