Abstract:
The presentation of Peachy Parallel Assignments in several workshops on parallel and distributed computing education aims to promote the reuse of high-quality assignments, both saving precious faculty time and improving the quality of course assignments. Presented assignments are selected competitively-- they must have been successfully used in a real classroom, be easy for other instructors to adopt, and be "cool and inspirational" to encourage students to spend time on them and talk about them with others. Winning assignments are also archived on the Peachy Parallel Assignments website.
In this installment of Peachy Parallel Assignments, we present three new assignments. The first assignment is to simulate an Abelian Sandpile, with grains of sand moving from tall piles to shorter ones. This is a discrete simulation that creates colorful and intricate images. The second assignment is a Big Data problem in which students use the MapReduce paradigm to recreate "Warming Stripes", a visualization of climate data that highlights climate change. The third assignment introduces climate-oriented optimization by asking students to schedule distributed workflows to minimize their carbon footprint.