OnRamp: A web-portal for teaching parallel and distributed computing

Computer Science students must understand parallel and distributed computing (PDC) concepts to be effective computer scientists in the workforce, as reflected in the 2013 ACM Curriculum guidelines. Significant work has been done by CS educators to develop curriculum materials and increase access to parallel compute environments (PCEs) by leveraging and clustering a plethora of small multicore systems. Even with these resources there is a barrier to entry for students to use PCEs, namely the unfamiliar and complex system software ecosystem of modern PCEs. The OnRamp project lowers that barrier to entry for exploring PDC concepts on a variety of PCEs by abstracting away the details of interacting with the system and focuses the students' attention on the PDC concepts. This top-down approach is in contrast to existing approaches involving all aspects of PDC necessarily being taught before the key concepts can be explored. In this paper we discuss the motivation, design and implementation of OnRamp, a general purpose web portal for supporting the exploration of PDC concepts that harnesses the existing educational resources created by the CS education community. It coaches students through interactive modules that teach them about PDC concepts and PCEs while allowing them to launch parallel applications from day one.