[TYPES/announce] Working group on Parallel Computing Education in Europe - Call for Participation

[cristina.pereira at informatics-europe.org]

Dear Colleagues,

Looking back to the last European Computer Science Summit of  
Informatics Europe we would like to draw your attention to a new  
initiative actively discussed in Milan. We are talking about a new  
Working Group within Informatics Europe which was announced in Milan:

?Parallel Computing (Supercomputing) Education in Europe: State-of-Art?.

Why did Informatics Europe take a decision to start this working  
group? Parallelism and concurrency have become an integral part of  
computer science for the last decade and, moreover, the degree of  
parallelism is constantly growing year by year. In 2020 there will be  
thousands cores in laptops and dozens/hundreds cores in mobile  
devices. How many of our students are ready for this forthcoming  
reality? We suppose, just a few?

Why did we mention ?Supercomputing? in the title of the working group?  
Supercomputing is an essential part of computing, it is one of the  
most important parts of parallel computing, it is a point where  
parallelism is concentrated, it is an area where numerous breakthrough  
technologies appear first before being widely used.

In summary, it is really time to think seriously about parallel  
computing and education.

What did we talk in Milan about? To be able to move in this direction  
we need to form a relatively small working group (about 10 people)  
with the mission:

- to show the need for urgent changes in higher education in the area  
of computational sciences,
- to compose a survey of the current landscape of parallel computing  
and supercomputing education in Europe with respect to different  
universities and countries,
- to prepare a set of recommendations how to bring ideas of parallel  
computing and supercomputing into higher educational systems of  
European countries.

If you feel that this is your topic, if you are interested to join the  
working group to be able to bring your ideas and to share your  
knowledge with our community - you are highly welcome!

Let us know about you decision by March, 9, 2012 sending a brief  
message to "wg-hpc-edu at parallel.ru".

If you have any questions do not hesitate to contact us:  
voevodin at parallel.ru, gergel at unn.ru.

Sincerely Yours,

Prof. Vladimir Voevodin, MSU and  Prof. Victor Gergel, NNSU