Welcome to the course

"Parallel Programming Concepts" !

We are excited to launch the first OpenHPI course on the concepts of parallel hardware and software in modern IT systems. For the next six weeks, our goal is to present you relevant theoretical and practical foundations for parallel programming. The course offers you a comprehensive (and definitely not exhaustive) overview of parallelization concepts. It is therefore especially helpful if you want to gather knowledge for assessing existing and new approaches and technologies in parallel computing and processing. 

The course is designed for an audience with existing skills in software development. You should be interested in getting a broader overview in different areas of parallelization, especially beyond the usage of multiple threads. We make no assumption on the kind of programming language you know, as long as you have a general understanding of how coding works. We will do our best to explain the content either in a language-independent way, or with example from different programming language perspectives.

This course is not suitable for you if ...

• ... you have no practical experience with software development at all.
• ... you only want a solution for a very specific parallelization problem.
• ... you want to get all the details about one specific parallelization approach, such as OpenMP.

The following introduction video gives you a short motivation about the topic and explains the OpenHPI concept of non-graded self tests, weekly graded assignments, and the final exam. We also constantly maintain a FAQ section, which hopefully answers most of the organizational questions you still may have after the first video.

The discussion forum allows you to get in contact with other students in this course. Please make use of this tool, especially in the later parts were the programming experience of different participants hopefully leads to an inspiring exchange of ideas and insights. The teaching team will constantly monitor the forums and tries to jump in whenever help is needed. The team members are:

• Dr. Peter Tröger
• M.Sc. Fahad Khalid
• M.Sc. Frank Feinbube
• Anton Gulenko
• Stefan Klauck
• Christian Kieschnick

So much for the introduction, have fun, and thanks for joining us!