Rethinking CS101 [Resources_Education]

Over 350 computer science students take Russ Miller's Discrete Structures course every fall semester. About 90 percent are freshmen. By week five, they are breaking problems into small chunks and learning ways to solve each chunk at the same time-in parallel. Today, multicore processors power our laptops and cellphones. Distributed cloud servers or supercomputer clusters process large data sets to improve Facebook news feeds or predict the weather. To take full advantage of these systems, you need parallel algorithms. "It's a parallel world," says Miller, a computer scientist at the State University of New York at Buffalo. "Why is no one teaching a course in parallel algorithms to freshmen?"