Over 150 programmers participated in the first UPCRC Illinois Summer School on Multicore Programming, June 22-26, 2009. Fifty-six participants attended at the Thomas M. Siebel Center for Computing Science on the Illinois campus while 109 attended online as virtual students. Graduate students representing a variety of research disciplines comprised about 60% of all summer school participants. Academic faculty and researchers accounted for 20%, and industry developers/researchers rounded out the diverse group of global participants.
UPCRC Co-Director Marc Snir opened the event with an "Introduction to Parallelism and Multicore Technology." The program featured lectures in the mornings followed by hands-on machine projects in the afternoons. Live Chat was available for online attendees to ask questions during lectures. Virtual students in different time zones were able to attend asynchronously via archived lectures accessible through their summer school account. Online forums, moderated by faculty and teaching assistants, were available for each lecture and lab topic. Each day concluded with a special lecture by Intel, Microsoft, or UPCRC Illinois. Several on-site students also took advantage of evening open lab hours, and all students enjoyed online, 24-hour access to UPCRC multicore systems.
UPCRC Co-Director, Wen-mei Hwu, Intel's Clay Breshears, and David Padua and Danny Dig of UPCRC Illinois joined Snir to teach this year's summer school. Ralph Johnson and Maria Garzaran of UPCRC Illinois served as the summer school lab education coordinators. Several UPCRC Illinois graduate research students served as chat/forum moderators and lab assistants.
UPCRC Illinois plans to offer the course again next summer. Information and announcements will be posted online and via the UPCRC email list. For more information about this year's curriculum, visit the summer school website.
