Abstract:

In modern computer systems, parallel programming has become an indispensable technique for increasing speed. However, since it is necessary to include different ideas from sequential execution in programming, it is difficult for beginners to learn. Therefore, this paper describes the policy for developing a prototype web application suite of learning materials for programming education of OpenMP, POSIX threads, AVX, MPI, CUDA, and OpenACC, which are the major technologies for parallel programming, as well as the current status of the completed prototype and its preliminary evaluation. This web application suite can be used not only as a self-study material for beginners, but also as a pre-study material in flipped classrooms, and can be used as a teaching material for online lectures during the period of self-restraint from face-to-face classes due to the measures against infectious diseases.

Preliminary evaluations have been made on CUDA programming and OpenMP programming in our previous literature, and it has been shown that the educational effect of the programming exercises using web applications on parallel programming is significant. Here, we present the results of measuring the effect of a pseudo-reversal class on MPI programming. The pre-test and post-test consisted of questions about the API to test grammatical knowledge and questions about the results of the calculation of the process ID (rank) of the data transfer function to test semantic understanding, and both tests were of approximately the same difficulty level. Post-test results for over 65% of examinees were greater than or equal to the pre-test results, so it is considered that the programming exercises with fill-in-the-blanks problems have a certain effect in promoting the understanding of MPI programming. In the test results, most of the errors were in the part related to the calculation of process IDs, which is to be expected, but we confirmed that this part is difficult for novice users.The results of the preliminary evaluation confirm that the web tool for programming exercises contributes to the improvement of the level of comprehension.

In the future, we would like to contribute to software education by improving the programming exercises to enhance the educational effects, and by confirming the effectiveness of this system by conducting demonstration experiments on the learning effects of MPI, OpenACC, and so on.

Keywords:

Programming language, parallel processing, high performance computing, PHP language, self-study.