New Working Group - Parallel Computing Education

Informatics Europe is happy to announce a call for participation in the working group “Parallel Computing (Supercomputing) Education in Europe: State-of-Art”.

The working group will be coordinated by Prof. Vladimir Voevodin, Moscow State University, and Prof. Victor Gergel, Nizhni Novgorod State, leaders of a remarkable educational effort with a broad impact and results that have significantly contributed to the improvement of Parallelism and Concurrency education in Russian. Their project, among other honors, was one of the winners of the 2011 Curriculum Award  granted by Informatics Europe and Intel.

Professors and educators from all Universities in Europe are welcome. Details on the working group plan and how to join can be found in the call below.

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 your decision by March, 9, 2012 sending a brief message to " This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. ".

If you have any questions do not hesitate to contact us:

This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. ,  This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. .

Sincerely Yours,


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