Winners 2011 Curriculum Best Practices Award
The winners of the 2011 Curriculum Best Practices Award for Parallelism and Concurrency were presented in a special ceremony during the ECSS 2011 in Milan, Italy.
A team from Germany, led by Georg Hager, Gerhard Wellein, and Jan Treibig, from the Erlangen Regional Computing Center and the Department of Computer Science at the University of Erlangen-Nuremberg and a team from Russia, led by Victor Gergel and Vladimir Voevodin, from Nizhni Novgorod State and Moscow State University, shared the 2011 Curriculum Best Practices Award, organized by Informatics Europe and sponsored by Intel. The Award ceremony was held in Milan, as part of the ECSS 2011 program, where the winners had the opportunity to present and discuss the achievements of their educational efforts in the area of Parallelism and Concurrency.
Victor Gergel and Vladimir Voevodin received the award for the proposal “Parallelism & Concurrency: Changing the Landscape of IT-Education” praised by the evaluation committee “For the development of a broad and significant project to develop curriculum materials for parallelism and concurrency.”
The impact of their activities in developing curricula, programs and courses for the improvement of education in the sphere of Parallelism and Concurrency is diverse and versatile. The textbooks published by the team are actively used in several Russian universities; numerous educational events (conferences, schools, seminars, educational programs), based on the developed training materials, have been organized and collaboration with leading IT companies and other industrial organizations have been established. Only in 2010 more than 400 people had training in Parallelism and Concurrency within the project's scope. The participants of the project published 6 textbooks and tutorials in 2009-2010. The developed courses and training materials were used for holding annually two youth schools, focused on the issues of Parallelism and Concurrency, and three conferences. Probation of the developed materials is carried out by the authors in the frames of educational programs of the three Competence Centers and in the large-scale Presidential Program of training specialists on supercomputing technologies.
More information about the group's activities:
http://www.software.unn.ac.ru/mo_evm/?dir=17
http://www.srcc.msu.su/nivc/index_engl.htm
Georg Hager, Gerhard Wellein and Jan Treibig received the award for the proposal “Teaching High Performance Computing to Scientists and Engineers: A Model-Based Approach” praised by the evaluation committee “For the development of a complete set of material for teaching programming of high-performance computers.”
The team's unique approach that combines the classic areas of parallelization and code optimization with the rational use of performance models is conveyed not only in lectures, but also in international workshops and tutorials. In 2010, Georg Hager and Gerhard Wellein published the textbook “Introduction to High Performance Computing for Scientists and Engineers,” which is meanwhile recommended reading for many courses worldwide in the field of scientific and high performance computing. Its widespread acceptance shows the impact of the team's work on teaching activities outside their own university.
More information about the group's activities:
http://www.hpc.informatik.uni-erlangen.de/
http://www.rrze.uni-erlangen.de/
More details about the two projects can be found in the two presentations from the Award Ceremony at the ECSS 2011, which can be accessed here:
The ceremony provided also the opportunity for the first official announcement of the next edition of the award:
"In 2012 the Informatics Europe Curriculum Award will recognize outstanding educational initiatives in the area of Embedded and Mobile Computing."
More details about the 2012 Award will be announced shortly. Follow our website and social media channels to be up to date!
