EduPar-16 Keynote

                                          Creating Foundations for Parallel and Distributed Computing

At Carnegie Mellon University, two core courses in the computer science curriculum are key to preparing students to master parallel and distributed computing:

* Introduction to Computer Systems emphasizes how the combination of hardware and software work together to support program execution and network communication, as viewed from a programmer's perspective. Among other topics, this course introduces students to concurrency synchronization, and thread-based programming. This course is the inspiration for the textbook "Computer Systems: A Programmer's Perspective," now in its third edition and used by over 290 schools worldwide.

* Parallel and Sequential Data Structures and Algorithms serves as our introductory algorithms course. It is based on a parallel model of computation, where programs execute on a maximum of P processors. Sequential algorithms are covered as a special case having P=1.

Having these courses as foundations, our students are then able to take courses in parallel computing and distributed systems that involve ambitious projects using a number of different machines and programming tools.

Biosketch

Randal E. Bryant is a University Professor in the Computer Science Department at Carnegie Mellon University. He has been on the faculty at Carnegie Mellon since 1984, starting as an Assistant Professor and progressing to his current rank of University Professor of Computer Science. He also holds a courtesy appointment in the Electrical and Computer Engineering Department. He served as Dean of the School of Computer Science from 2004 to 2014.

Dr. Bryant teaches courses in computer systems. Along with David R. O'Hallaron, he developed a novel approach to teaching about the hardware, networking, and system software that comprise a system from the perspective of an advanced programmer, rather than from those of the system designers. Their textbook ``Computer Systems: A Programmer's Perspective,'' now in its third edition, is in use at over 280 universities worldwide, with translations into Chinese, Korean, Macedonian, and Russian.

Dr. Bryant spent the 1989-1990 academic year as a Visiting Research Fellow at Fujitsu Laboratories in Kawasaki, Japan, and the 2014-2015 academic year as Assistant Director for Information Technology Research and Development at the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy.

Dr. Bryant received his B.S. in Applied Mathematics from the University of Michigan in 1973, and his PhD from MIT in 1981. He was an assistant professor at Caltech from 1981 to 1984.