Peachy Parallel Assignments (EduPar 2024)

We present two new assignments in the Peachy Parallel Assignments series of assignments for teaching parallel and distributed computing. Submitted assignments must have been successfully used previously and are selected for being easy for other instructors to adopt and for being “cool and inspirational” so that students spend time on them and talk about them with others. The first assignment in this paper familiarizes students with the RAFT library for performing GPU-accelerated computation, part of the RAPIDS AI ecosystem. Students use this library to accelerate a Radius Nearest Neighbor computation, finding all points within a given distance from a query point. In the second assignment, students parallelize a bird flocking simulation using OpenMP or OpenACC. It is a visual assignment which allows students to readily see the performance improvement.