What the parallel-processing community has (failed) to offer the multi/many-core generation

The International Parallel and Distributed Processing Symposium (IPDPS) 2008 panel with the title “How to avoid making the same Mistakes all over again: What the parallel-processing Community has (failed) to offer the multi/many-core Generation” sought to provoke discussion on current and recent computer science education in relation to the emergence of fundamentally parallel multi/many-core systems. Is today’s/tomorrow’s/yesterday’s computer science graduate equipped to deal with the challenges of parallel software development for such systems? Are mistakes from the past being unnecessarily repeated? What are the fundamental contributions of the parallel processing research community to the current state of affairs that are possibly being ignored? What are the new challenges that have not been addressed in past parallel processing research? How should computer-science education in parallel processing look like? Should it be taught at all?To the extent that there was consensus among the panelists, they agreed on the premise for the panel, namely that there is a mismatch in computer-science education concerning parallelism, and that there may be reasons to be concerned. They agreed on stressing the importance of (a) applications as a driving factor in research and education, (b) parallel algorithms, and of (c) focusing on the ease of parallel programming and not exclusively on parallel performance, and cited for instance heterogeneous parallelism and power awareness as new issues for the multi-core generation.The panelists were Hideharu Amano (Keio University), John Gustafson (Clearspeed Technologies), Keshav Pingali (University of Austin, Texas), Vivek Sarkar (Rice University), Uzi Vishkin (University of Maryland), and Katherine Yelick (University of California at Berkeley). The panel was organized and moderated by the author.