PDC Education in the BGU ECE Department

This paper describes two undergraduate Parallel and Distributed Computing (PDC) courses which are taught in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE) at Ben-Gurion University (BGU). The first course, An Introduction to Parallel Processing is mandatory and the follow-up course, Parallel and Distributed Computing is an elective. Great efforts have been invested in making these courses attractive and up to date. Significant resources and budget constraints make this goal challenging. It is also a dilemma what material to choose, at what depth, what to ignore and also what should be the right balance between theoretical algorithms and practical tools. There is no single answer to these questions. This paper describes the author´s way of coping with these questions. There are several unique features in the two courses such as the adoption of Virtual Machines, the preference of Open Source Software and the use of on-line material. All these make the PDC courses very accessible to the students. Two unique home assignments using HTCondor, a High-Throughput Computing tool, are described. Finally, an extensive list of references is provided at the end of this paper which may be useful for other educators in similar courses.