A breadth-first course in multicore and manycore programming

The technique of scaling hardware performance through increasing the number of cores on a chip requires programmers to learn to write parallel code that can exploit this hardware. In order to expose students to a variety of multicore programming models, our university offered a breadth-first introduction to multicore and manycore programming for upper-level undergraduates. Our students gained programming experience with three different parallel programming models, two of which are less than five years old and targeted specifically to multicore and manycore computing. Assessments throughout the semester showed that the course gave students a broad base of experience from which they will be able to understand ongoing developments in the field.