Facilitating the learning process in parallel computing by using instant messaging

Abstract

[EN] Parallel Programming skills may require a long time to acquire. “Think in parallel” is a skill that requires time, efort, and experience. In this work, we propose to facilitate the students’ learning process in parallel programming by using instant messaging. Our aim was to fnd out whether students’ interaction through instant messaging tools is benefcial 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 specifc parallel application, each of them using a diferent application program interface: OpenMP, MPI, CUDA, or OpenCL. Even though the used APIs are diferent, 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.