Integrating Parallel and Distributed Computing Topics into an Undergraduate CS Curriculum

We present changes to our undergraduate computer science curriculum for a small liberal arts college. The changes are designed to incorporate parallel and distributed computing topics into all levels of our curriculum, with the goal of ensuring that all graduating CS majors have exposure to, and experience with, parallel and distributed computing. Our effort is motivated by the ACM/IEEE Ironman Curriculum, which includes a increased focus on these important topics. In addition, we use the NSF/IEEE-TCPP model curriculum as a guide in our effort. Because of the small size of our department, and the breadth constraints of a liberal arts college, we face some unique challenges. Our multi-year effort involves at least six courses in our curriculum. Of these courses, one is a new introductory-level course, while the others are existing courses whose content has been modified to include more focus on these important topics. We present our curricular changes and we discuss an initial evaluation of the first implementation of these changes.