Tuesday, June 16, 2009

Crash Course, Day One

We tried something new this year with the supercomputing course. My colleague taught a beginning class on unix, vi, makefiles, and serial programming in C today. Tomorrow I will teach about parallelism, MPI, OpenMP, and parallel programming.

Today's course went well, and I think the students got a lot out of it. I arranged for one of my friends to be the lunchtime speaker so that we could provide a free lunch, and from what I heard, they enjoyed her talk too (I was off giving a tour at the time).

My colleague and I have different teaching styles. He had very few slides and spent most of the time interacting with the students and doing hands-on activities. I'm more of a lecturer, although I do encourage audience participation. I think also my topics require more explaining, and his required more trying it out for yourself.

He had only two very short handouts. I, on the other hand, have contributed to deforestation with my handouts for tomorrow. But I hope the students will be able to use those handouts as a reference when they do parallel programming in the future.

2 comments:

PhizzleDizzle said...

i need a crash source on openMP/MPI, etc. with the new job i am really feeling the need to understand (at a high level) all the implications of all things computer-y. :)

Rebecca said...

Might I recommend this one? :)