Abstract:
The presentation of Peachy Parallel Assignments at parallel and distributed computing education workshops is an effort to promote the reuse of high-quality assignments, both saving precious faculty time and improving the quality of course assignments. These assignments must have been used in class and are selected for being easy to adopt by other instructors and for being "cool and inspirational" so that students spend time on them and talk about them with others. The assignments and their materials are also archived on the Peachy Parallel Assignments website.
In this paper, we present two new assignments. The first has students implement the Mandelbrot set in Python, combining an interesting image with Python's ease of use. The second assignment is a substantial project to implement a programming contest judge. It requires that students use many parallel and distributed computing concepts, with the added benefit of solving a "real problem" and creating software with which students may have personally interacted.