The Boston University Parallel Curriculum

Azer Bestavros, Roscoe Giles, Abdelsalam Heddaya, Steve Homer and Claudio Rebbi, Boston University

Boston University is offering an interdisciplinary course sequence in parallel computing for undergraduates.The students work in a new laboratory equipped with a network of high performance graphics workstations linked to the University's CM-5 Connection Machine supercomputer. The goal is to introduce undergraduate natural science and computer science majors to parallel computation and to computational science within their major fields.

The first course, introduction to parallel computing, examines parallel methods and their applications in the natural sciences. >From this base, students choose from the more advanced courses which explore specific applications and concepts in chemistry, computer science, engineering and physics. Students from all the advanced courses meet together in a weekly laboratory/seminar to explore computational algorithms and related issues of cross-disciplinary importance.

We will present an overview of this curriculum and a brief look at several of the courses as they are currently constituted. These courses have been developed under the auspices of the Boston University Center for Computational Science with the assistance of grants from the National Science Foundation.