Survey

Name (Lastname | Firstname)

Cotham

John

1. Prior to this semester, how many parallel programs had you written?

I have written a few programs with threads, but nothing that I've specified to run on different cores or computers.

2. Prior to this semester, how many CPUs (or cores) had you run your code on?

I have written a few programs with threads, but nothing that I've specified to run on different cores or computers.

3. What kind of work do you plan to do after you graduate?

I'm interested in data visualization, but I'm not sure what's about to happen.

4. What, in your view, is the future importance of parallel programming?

It seems to be the way forward. New materials like graphene may allow us to power up the Ghz a little bit, but the largest gains in speed are likely to come from more and more transisters and more parallelization.

5. What, in your view, will be the importance of parallel programming in your future work?

I doubt I'll be parallelizing code very much by hand, but who knows? I think it will be a good skill to have in the back pocket.

6. What makes UT a unique/special place for students to learn parallel programming?

There seems to be plenty of resources to explore parallel programming with Newton and the new clusters we set up.