Interactive textbooks for parallel and distributed computing across the undergraduate cs curriculum

Abstract

It has been a decade since the ACM/IEEE CS2013 Curriculum guidelines recommended that all CS students learn about parallel and distributed computing (PDC). But few text-books for “core” CS courses–especially first-year courses–include coverage of PDC topics. To fill this gap, we have written free, online, beginner- and intermediate-level PDC textbooks, containing interactive C/C++ OpenMP, MPI, mpi4py, CUDA, and OpenACC code examples that students can run and modify directly in the browser. The books address a serious challenge to teaching PDC concepts, namely, easy access to the powerful hardware needed for observing patterns and scalability. This paper describes the content of these textbooks and the underlying infrastructure that make them possible. We believe the described textbooks fill a critical gap in PDC education and will be very useful for the community.