Increasing Efficiency in Parallel Programming Teaching

The ability to teach parallel programming principles and techniques is becoming fundamental to prepare a new generation of programmers able to master the pervasive parallelism made available by hardware vendors. Classical parallel programming courses leverage either low-level programming frameworks (e.g. those based on Pthreads) or higher level frameworks such as OpenMP or MPI. We discuss our teaching experience within the Master in 'Computer Science and networking' where parallel programming is taught leveraging structured parallel programming principles and frameworks. The paper summarizes the results achieved in eight years of experience and shows how the adoption of a structured parallel programming approach improves the efficiency of the teaching process.