We in academia and industry are at least a generation behind in preparing the next generation of computer scientists and engineers for parallel and many core computing.  So said, Dan Garcia, Lecturer SOE in the Computer Science division of the EECS department at the University of California, Berkeley, to  Tom Murphy and I on our first Teach Parallel broadcast.

Professor Garcia averred that the move to multi-core computing caught the academic community a bit unprepared; many of whom are still teaching sequential programming to students already using at least dual core systems. Dan added that we are entering an era ripe with new opportunities - consider the promise of cloud computing where undergraduates are already able to write a few lines of code using the map reduce paradigm and run apps across data centers based on tens, hundreds or even thousands of compute cores.

Listening to Dan, it is clear that we must fundamentally reevaluate what and how we teach: data structures, algorithms, testing and more all need to be rethought in terms of parallelism.  UC Berkley, Dan saaid, began to look at their courses from the point of view of a coder in order to determine where to make these changes.  This benefits both those students who will be leaving after four years for jobs in industry, as well those pursuing higher degrees.

At the very least, students should take one full quarter or semester of parallelism as undergraduates. Even better, Dan added, the undergraduate curriculum should be infused with parallelism inclusively.

I am also a proponent of looking at the entire curriculum with an eye to making parallelism the norm.  This is easier said than done of course.  To begin with, many faculty are still ramping up on parallelism and concurrency themselves.  Further, many colleges simply do not have have the resources to devote to the issue.  Dan added that this is where industry can help out by providing resources and modules to jump start this process.

Speaking personally (usual disclaimers about this being my opinion and not necessarily the view of my employer), I would add that we in industry are not yet doing enough. CPU manufacturers, as well as software and OS vendors, need to support the new compute platform by enabling academia to teach the next gen computer scientists and engineers.  This is not to say that there are not excellent industry efforts, there are.  But some problems are big enough that they take cooperation across the board.  I believe that this is one such instance.  There is plenty even for business rivals to agree on at an enabling level that will allow us to compete even more effectively at an implementation level.

Please listen to Dan's podcast in it's entirety and leave you thoughts below.  Do not forget to tune into our future events.  We'll see you next time online or avatar-to-avatar in Science Sim.

As some of you may already know I am getting married May 11'th. Yes, yes, a very happy occasion. Doesn't leave time for anything... Well, there is enough for a blog post but not enough for writing code and doing some QA.
I actually started with the Radix-Sort Challenge (Threading-Challenge-2009) but couldn't find the time to have it completed, not even talking about tested? So I thought that I might as well share my thoughts about this problem. Philosophically that is, nothing tested, no responsibility, so I can allow myself to wonder off and talk about things that may not even work ;-)

Going over Wikipedia (as briefly as possible) I learned that Radix sort is a type of sort that deals with constant size data types. Sorting algorithms deal massively with data comparisons. Since the input for this challenge was defined as 7 ASCII characters for each data item, it is very simple to convert it to a 64 bit integer. As a collection of 64 bit integers the CPU can compare two items in a single instruction and all new compilers have support for that. So basically the task is to sort a list of integers.
I was asking myself how many cores I should use and whether or not I should use the build in CPU acceleration such as MMX. The simple answer I found was that if the collection of numbers can fit in the fast cache then I should start doing some math? However the problem here deals with somewhere up to 2^31 items, or up to 2G of items. This is way over the size of any cache so the work is done by the CPU directly with memory.
The memory is always slower than the CPU and the operation to perform takes a single CPU instruction. This means that the bottle neck should be the memory and therefore the strategy should start by reducing memory transactions to the minimum.

The simplest and fastest solution I could think of for sorting numbers was to merge sorted lists. For example when we want to sort a list of 8 items we first sort the data as two lists of 4 items and then join the two lists. This manner requires only a single passage over every item in the list for every merge. For example a list of 1,6,3,7,9,2,5,4 is split and sorted into 1,3,6,7 and 2,4,5,9. The sort algorithm only goes forward in the list and has only a single comparison to make. Working in merges it takes 31 passes over every data item to complete 2G of items.
The problem is that reading an item and copying it to an output list handles 2K of memory for every 1K of data to sort. The goal is to reduce memory transaction to the minimum. The solution is to swap the items in the merged lists, so for two merging lists of A1,A2,A3,A4 and B1,B2,B3,B4 the output should be a multi-dimensional array of: A1,B1,A2,B2,A3,B3,A4,B4. The next merge will result in A1,B1,C1,D1,A2,B2,C2? and so on. This will keep memory transactions to the minimum amount and also ensure that the memory is still in CPU cache for as long as possible.

Eventually the merges should be on lists that are too long for the cache to hold them, for example a merge between two lists of 100MB. The only thing we can do to utilize the cache is to keep merging on the same list for as long as possible, instead of methodically merging all the 1KB lists in the system from start to end. Another optimization that might help just a bit is merging forwards and backwards alternatively instead of going forwards all the time. When a forward merge is complete the end of the list is in cache so it is more efficient to start merging from that point downward to the beginning of the list. At the end of a reverse order merge the cache holds the beginning of the list and it is most efficient to merge forwards.

This is what I was going to try and test. Single threaded. That is of course if I had the time? but as you already know, I barely have the time to write about it in a blog post.

Good luck to everyone who did.

If you are reading this and you feel that my guesses are all bad ? feel free to say it out loud. You can also reflect about it out loud, or just congratulate me for my eminent wedding? anything goes :-)

Best,
Asaf

So here is the marketing message. Starting today (April 27th @ 1:00 PM EST), Dynamism is accepting pre-orders for $599, with the first orders expected to ship on May 8th. And, as an added incentive, those who pre-order will also get a spare battery, a car kit, and a leather pouch, which Dynamism says is a $135 value.

All excuses aside, I was in a little rush recording this video; mainly because I have to return the Viliv in the morning. So if there is a mistake, please forgive me and I assure you that I will apologize tomorrow. Hopefully, I can get my hands on it again soon in the future and record a more comprehensive video. Enjoy.

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Moodle stands for Modular Object-Oriented Dynamic Learning Environment. In the technical terms, Moodle is Open Source Learning Management System (LMS) which enables learning professionals (educators) to create engaging online learning courses. Moodle is the brainchild of Martin Dougiamas, who designed the program while working on his Ph.D. at Curtin University of Technology, Perth, Australia. He developed it as a tool for his dissertation which was on a socio-constructivist approach to learning. Thus Moodle originally excelled in features which supported this approach to education, in particular through its very user-friendly discussion forum layout. Dougiamas programmed Moodle in PHP, a programming (or more strictly, "scripting') language that can create web pages based on user input and data-based information. Moodle's Philosophy of learning  is its focuses on collaboration, activities and critical reflection. This social-constructive approach involves a strong community of learning orientation rather than simple online computting courses and exercises. In general, a constructive amount of connected activities within a learning community is a very powerful stimulant for learning, not only bringing people closer together but promoting synergy among educators and learners.

In today's internet connected world, virtually every educational institution or corporation, one way or another, has by now adopted a Virtual Learning Environment (VLE) or CMS (Course Management System) for use either as an aid to its traditional courses (often called a "integrated" or "hybrid" course system), or as a tool for its distance or off-campus education program via some commercial CMS, of which are expensive to license and which are rather rigid in the ways that they can be used. Moodle is different, rather than just publishing , assessing and reporting the information educator think learners need to know, it  create a platform on which each participant in a course, no matter if he or she is an educator or learner, can switch role in between. Your job as an educator can change from being originator of knowledge to being an influencer and role model of class culture, connecting with learners in a personal way that addresses their own learning needs, and promoting and facilating discussions and interactive activities in a way that collectively leads students towards the learning goals of the class achieving multi-threaded knowledge transfer.

Moodle has a very active community cross over 200 countries with 670k member. With a user base of this size situated around the world, it is common for moodle user to receive help within a matter of hours from different countries, some time with different language, regardless of the local time of day. Moodle community members not only give help, but have also continue to add new module or plugins codes to help a user to modify a current feature or create a new one. Now let us take a closer look at some of the top key features, blocks and modules of Moodle which are of the interest of academic and software developer training community.

• Interface languages: when a user logs on, there is a drop down menu from which he can select an interface language. Once set, that language choice remains unless another language is selected. These language modules have all been created by volunteers.
• Multiple material type support: Moodle platform is well positioned to host different learning materials such as animation, case study, drill and practice, lecture/presentation, quiz/test, video, live chat, survey, simulation and virtual conference etc. All are materailized by  Assignment Module, Chat Module, Choice Module, Forum Module, Journal Module, Poll, Quiz Module, Resource Module, Survey Module and Workshop Module. Embedded Shockwave Flash (.swf) files.  
• WYSIWYG HTML editor: It is the embedded tool in Moodle for users to edit text entry areas like resources, forum postings and journal entries. Copies of forum posts, teacher feedback etc can be mailed in HTML or plain text, and electronic assignment submissions. Instructors have various choices for course formats such as by week, by topic or a discussion-focused social format. 
• Activity Report: It is the full logging and tracking report for each student with graphs and module details (Access/Number of time read) as well as details of each student involvement like postings and journal entries.The course activity in Moodle includes Forums, Journals, Quizzes, Resources, Choices, Surveys, Assignments, Chats, and Workshops as well as virtual areas for group work. Instructor can easily get full reports of the activities of individual students, or of all students for a specific activity.
• The quiz-making function:  Self-assessment quizzes and online testing.  Quiz types such as: Multiple choice, True/False, Numerical, Matching, Description, and Cloze. A wide range of options allows you to randomize the questions and multiple-choice items, specify a time frame for availability, choose whether the students receive feedback or not, decide if they are allowed to view the correct answers, and determine how many times they may take the quiz and how it is to be scored.
• Modular design: Each functional feature of Moodle can be regarded as a module. Moodle is built in a very modular fashion. New functions can be created and activated merely by dropping them into the site's directory where all of the plug-in modules are stored. There are site management, user management and course management for different users with different access.

Entering "Moodle?, an open-source platform, which is not only free but also highly adaptable for computer science education, universities and corporation education organization are quickly discovering that they can spend far less on down payment by implementing Moodle, and then  use some of the savings to tailor it to work precisely the way it is needed for a tight fit. And evidence have shown that moodle ( LMS) is no longer a tool used by low budget on-line or distance learning institutions. In stead, more and more universities wih PhD and MS curriculum  and professional training organization have finished their transition of traditional instructor lead class into moodle based dynamic online class, integrated with community ingredients,  such as California Tech Computer Science Curriculum, Virginia Tech Computer Science Curriculum , Oregon Inst. of Tech. Curriculum for Computer Science and Tech and International conference such as Super Computing Education moodle which is  sponsored by  ACM and IEEE. At the same time, more universities have been systematically evaluating and piloting Moodle as the online learning management system. For example, at University of North Carolina at Charlotte (http://www.lmseval.uncc.edu/ ),  In 2008,  10 faculty participated the pilot and taught classes based on Moodle, and created a focus group to discuss their Moodle experiences, and in the following term in earlier 2009, the pilot extended to 18 new faculty members selected based on a variety of criteria, including college representation, course types, experienced vs. new users, fully online vs. hybrid, and face to face courses  and concluded that moodle offers advantages include ease of use and mastery, minimal support, collaboration with the open source community, flexibility, and adaptability to the needs of faculty and students.

On technical side, Moodle can run on virtually any machine, Windows, Macintosh  or Linux, as long as the followings are installed: 1) an Apache web server, 2) the page generation freeware, PHP, and 3) a database application, usually, but not limited to MySQL.  All are open source. Applications exist for all platforms and are listed under "Installing Apache, MySQL and PHP" at http://moodle.org/doc/. Some basic fact about moodle is listed below:

Name:             

Moodle

Originator:

Martin Dougiamas

Web Site:

http://moodle.org

Product type:

Course management system

Platform:

Any platform with Apache, PHP and a database system such as MySQL installed

Price:

Free

Best Features

Can easily have every feature you want as there is always someone around willing to program it

Registered community member (Moodle.org)

672,965 ( as of 4/24/09 and growing)

It is not yet to know how long Moodle can keep its exponential growth. For sure, it will help academic or corporate educators connect with learners, but in the larger scope, perhaps it will connect and optimize the fragmented knowledge and resource in different institutions, and eventually make the knowledge transfer process in an orchestrated and connected way, especially in the United States, where people expect more from universities and employer, while at the same time the available tax dollars are dropping.

I am a Moodler since 2009 and building a Moodle platform for Intel academic community. Currently, I am actively working on every details of the project. If you have any suggestion or comments that you want to share with the reader of this blog, you can add them here. I would also love to hear from you if you choose to email me at tao.b.wang@intel.com.

It is also likely that Windows Server 2008 R2 RC, also build 7100, will be available to download from MSDN and TechNet on April 30th.