學生對 洛桑联邦理工学院 提供的 并行编程 的評價和反饋

All but the last assignment are interesting. A fair amount of the lectures are also good, even though some of them are too theoretical - the bad lectures are the ones that focus too much into proving mathematical properties, but thankfully there is just a few of those.

The last assignment is considerably larger than the other ones and requires a physics background (or interest to do research on your own). I think they could improve it by approaching the material independently with smaller exercises before applying them again into the larger application that is built as part of the assignment today.

Plus: Very in-depth lectures, challenging assignments. Minus: The actual parallel code somewhat remains a black-box, assignments sometimes focus more on figuring out the algorithm logic which may not have anything to do with the course. Still I enjoyed it and learned a great deal.

Some of the practical examples are a bit tedious, because the bigger issues you sometimes need to solve seem to be implementing a random algorithm, instead of implementing its parallelization per se. That is, the support classes for parallelizing the algorithms are pre-coded for you, while you at times spend more time figuring out how the algorithm itself needs to be implemented with that rather than coming up with these parallelization semaphores (which I would have considered more interesting, at least). But the content covered is highly relevant and first class (the authors being world-leading experts on the topic), so if you are interested in parallel programming, this is course is a great choice.

First 3 weeks were cool, but the last week was somehow rushed and the assignment did not involve any parallel programming.

The tasks are not well designed for online education

General idea of the course is very good. There are a few things to improve though:

Focus more on intuition behind algorithms rather than formal math

Build a solid foundation that would allow students to develop parallel algorithms themselves.

Practical assignments should focus exactly on this, rather than filling in missing pieces of code that are only tangentially related to the algorithm itself.

It would be helpful if the course provided minimal but solid basics and intuition behind parallel computations. The basics that would allow students to learn more advanced concepts themselves.

In any case, the course has a lot of value and the instructors are awesome.

Nice and complicated

Very interesting material, especially the prefix sum algorithms about, how to transform a sequential problem into a parallel problem.

Very good introductory theoretical foundation for parallell algorithms, and background for

the Big Data Analysis with Scala and Spark course.

Amazing practice assignments! It was very interesting to solve them.

Hard course, but gives good insights about the challenges and solutions for parallel programming.

Very interesting, with difficult examples and task. Spent a lot of time analyzing weekly assignments but it was totally worth.

This course analyse the parallel programming from both practical and theoretical point of view. It gives the instruments both to understand the Scala library in its completeness and expressiveness in parallel computing, and the theoretical knowledge to understand what's "under the hood", to allow the student to understand whether the parallelism could be effective or not.

I greatly suggest this course to anyone interested in parallel computing.

Like the other courses in this series, the lectures and exercises are excellent. Coming from a communications background, this course presented me with an opportunity to build on what I already knew but also offered new and interesting insights related to algorithm performance tuning. The course has a nice mix of theory and serviceable information. If you've never done any type of high-performance computing, this is a nice gentle introduction into the subject. The instructions took a lot of time to build fun and interesting exercises that are meticulously constructed.

Excelente curso...

Excellent course, pretty challenging difficulty. Thanks to the instructors for putting together some very interesting material.

Good course, though there is sometimes too much mathematics, what distracts from the purpose to learn parallel paradigm in Scala.

This is an excellent course!!!

Presents Scala's parallel collections, and how they work under the hood. The prefix-sum algorithm is quite mind-blowing, and so are Conc-Trees. The algorithms are presented with plenty of detail, step by step, I enjoyed it!

I learned a lot about improving algorithms to run in a parallelized manner which is more efficient when having more than one cpu/computers

very awesome course !!!

Awesome!

quite hard, but useful

Parallel Programming course in Scala will help you to program at a higher level, reason about task and data parallel programs, express common algorithms in a functional style and solve them in parallel, competently microbenchmark parallel code, and write programs that effectively use parallel collections to achieve performance. The course content was well organized and it had in - depth assignments which were relatively difficult for me to complete. I would recommend this course to everyone, and one should take it only after taking the 'Fundamental Programming Principles in Scala' and 'Functional Program Design in Scala' courses.

This is not a course about concurrency with Scala; it has very basic coverage of threads and synchronization towards the beginning, and that's it.

This is about parallelism, specifically about approaches to program design with the goal of leveraging parallelism. Yes, the assignments require immersing oneself in problems that have little to do with parallelism per se. But they are interesting, fun, and of course they nicely illustrate the concepts that are being imparted.

Another excellent course by EPFL.