Undergraduate Education and Research in Software and Algorithm Development for Massively Parallel Computers

The focus of this project is to improve undergraduate teaching of software development for massively parallel computers. The instruction will include communication between processors, programming languages, parallel algorithms, artificial intelligence, and data structures. Since massively parallel computers are quite different from traditional sequential machines, it is becoming more important to introduce massively parallel computing early in students careers. A 1024-processor Distributed Array Processor was acquired to support the teaching of massively parallel computing, parallel language constructs, artificial intelligence, and parallel algorithms for computational physics. This project is significant because it focusses on the early introduction of students to massively parallel computation, which is rapidly becoming an important area of computing technology.