Parallel Paths

First, for all my life I have been a champion of many educational issues. Education is far too important to just to be left in the hands of educators. It is not a commodity. By this I mean, education is both a community AND individual personal responsibility.

The processes of education runs in parallel with processes of training. These are very different functions, although these functions are often confused. Often, training and education are in conflict.

Which brings me to the point of this posting: In software engineering, we are trained to view software either from a serial perspective, or a parallel perspective, or maybe some combination of the two. It is obvious that we can run several serial tasks in parallel, and that parallel paths often consist of individual serial task lanes. Nice, neat, very deterministic.

We are taught to rollout loops and partition data for parallel processing - and that is good thing to learn. But I wonder, is the way we are trained to think about computer science and software engineering - in exclusive terms of serial and parallel fabrics - preventing us from understanding the value other computational fabrics? In other words, has our training overly constrained the purposes of our education?

Many of the systems I deal with exhibit a property called complexity. Often this is considered a "problem" - to be avoided or simplified, rather than considered offering an excellent solution strategy. From a computational point of view, complex networks offer extremely efficient encoding capabilities, and sometimes (but, not always) extremely efficient computational capabilities.

In putting together a proposal for a VLS compute cluster, I see how dissonance between training and education affects the conceptualization of computation on clusters of many highly trained professionals. Is this an educational opportunity? Or does training rule the day?

Stay tuned ...