Teaching High Performance Computing through Parallel Programming Marathons

Parallel and distributed programming is essential for exploiting the processing power of modern computing platforms. However, during the first years of a Computer Science course, students usually learn problem solving techniques, data structures and programming paradigms that are inherently sequential, hindering the transition to parallel architectures. Parallel Programming Marathons organized in Brazil are similar to other Programming Competitions around the world and have been used for teaching and stimulating undergraduate and graduate students into learning to "think in parallel" and to develop applications for different parallel architectures, including multicores, clusters and accelerators. This paper presents the structure of this Parallel Programming Marathon and an overview of how it supports regional and national contests. Also, this work presents use cases on Parallel and Distributed Computing course from two different Brazilian universities that use a challenge based learning approach and employ marathon problems as course assignments. This approach contributed to increase students' interest towards High Performance Computing.