New MOOC: openHPI Course Teaches Parallel Programming Concepts
POTSDAM, Germany, January 14, 2014 /PRNewswire/ --
The eighth open online course offered by the Hasso Plattner Institute (HPI), which starts on February 3, will introduce the fundamental concepts of parallel programming. Accessible to anyone via www.openHPI.de, the Institute's interactive Internet educational platform, this free course will give participants an overview of the methods and techniques used by software engineers to optimize the performance of computers with multiple processing cores. Instructing the course in English will be Dr. Peter Tröger, a senior researcher in the HPI research group Operating Systems and Middleware. Online registration for the course is already open at: https://openhpi.de/course/parprog2014.
"The new course will present the essential theoretical and practical foundations of parallel programming," said Tröger. Participants will learn about important concepts such as synchronization, concurrency and deadlock, while also being introduced to the architecture of modern parallel hardware. Further topics covered will include programming models, message-oriented coordination, functional programming, programming patterns and typical optimizations.
"The course is aimed at anyone who wishes to gain a greater understanding of the fundamentals of parallel programming, without being forced to choose a specific programming language. Participants should have a basic knowledge of software development; there are no further prerequisites," said Tröger. The subject is particularly relevant because manufacturers of the latest generation of game consoles and producers of state-of-the-art supercomputers are increasingly integrating processing cores into computer systems. The laws of physics prevent the speed of a single processing core from being increased much further. Parallel processing techniques that use multiple processors can achieve a huge improvement in performance.
openHPI.de has already had some 95,000 enrolments for its free, six-week-long massive open online courses (MOOCs). Almost 60,000 active online learners from more than 114 countries have registered on the learning site.
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