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Using microlabs to teach modern distributed computing

Published: 10 March 2010 Publication History

Abstract

Closed labs have become a common feature in computer science education because they provide hands-on experience in a supervised setting. Microlabs extend this approach into the lecture format with very short hands-on activities in the "middle of" the lecture. This approach was developed for a modern distributed computing course that integrated all levels of parallelism (multicore, cluster, and grid) into a single course and required a substantial course project that used all these levels. After presenting the current status of our activities, we will discuss future directions that include stand-alone distributed computing modules and a distributed computing repository. This work is supported, in part, by a National Science Foundation grant.

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K. Bowles, A CS1 course based on Stand-Alone Microcomputers, SIGCSE Bulletin, Vol. 9, No. 1, February 1978, 125--127
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C. Ellsworth, J. Fenwick, B. Kurtz: The Quiver system. SIGCSE Bulletin, Vol. 35, No. 1, March 2004: 205--209
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Globus - http://www.globus.org
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B. Kurtz, H. Pfeiffer, "Developing Programming Quizzes to Support Instruction in Abstract Data Types", SIGCSE Bulletin, Vol. 21, No. 1, February 1989, pp. 66--70
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MPI - http://www.mcs.anl.gov/research/projects/mpich2/
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Cited By

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  • (2012)Developing microlabs using Google web toolkitProceedings of the 43rd ACM technical symposium on Computer Science Education10.1145/2157136.2157311(607-612)Online publication date: 29-Feb-2012
  • (2011)Teaching mobile computing and developing software to support computer science educationProceedings of the 42nd ACM technical symposium on Computer science education10.1145/1953163.1953327(589-594)Online publication date: 9-Mar-2011

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cover image ACM Conferences
SIGCSE '10: Proceedings of the 41st ACM technical symposium on Computer science education
March 2010
618 pages
ISBN:9781450300063
DOI:10.1145/1734263
Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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Publication History

Published: 10 March 2010

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Author Tags

  1. cluster computing
  2. computer science labs
  3. distributed computing
  4. grid computing
  5. multicore computing

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Cited By

View all
  • (2012)Developing microlabs using Google web toolkitProceedings of the 43rd ACM technical symposium on Computer Science Education10.1145/2157136.2157311(607-612)Online publication date: 29-Feb-2012
  • (2011)Teaching mobile computing and developing software to support computer science educationProceedings of the 42nd ACM technical symposium on Computer science education10.1145/1953163.1953327(589-594)Online publication date: 9-Mar-2011

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