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Learner Reviews & Feedback for Parallel programming by École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne

4.4
stars
1,835 ratings

About the Course

With every smartphone and computer now boasting multiple processors, the use of functional ideas to facilitate parallel programming is becoming increasingly widespread. In this course, you'll learn the fundamentals of parallel programming, from task parallelism to data parallelism. In particular, you'll see how many familiar ideas from functional programming map perfectly to to the data parallel paradigm. We'll start the nuts and bolts how to effectively parallelize familiar collections operations, and we'll build up to parallel collections, a production-ready data parallel collections library available in the Scala standard library. Throughout, we'll apply these concepts through several hands-on examples that analyze real-world data, such as popular algorithms like k-means clustering. Learning Outcomes. By the end of this course you will be able to: - reason about task and data parallel programs, - express common algorithms in a functional style and solve them in parallel, - competently microbenchmark parallel code, - write programs that effectively use parallel collections to achieve performance Recommended background: You should have at least one year programming experience. Proficiency with Java or C# is ideal, but experience with other languages such as C/C++, Python, Javascript or Ruby is also sufficient. You should have some familiarity using the command line. This course is intended to be taken after Functional Program Design in Scala: https://www.coursera.org/learn/progfun2....

Top reviews

AL

Apr 23, 2018

The course is fairly advanced and you would need to review the materials many times to understand the concept. The assignments are definitely fun and not as straightforward as other courses.

RC

Aug 24, 2017

Superb study material. Learnt a lot during this course. I am not much into mathematical stuff, but got a hang of how to break problems and improve efficiency through parallelism.

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226 - 250 of 273 Reviews for Parallel programming

By Pedro R

Mar 15, 2017

Great course!

By c86jeff

Jan 22, 2017

learned a lot

By dh l

Dec 7, 2016

Thanks!

By Taewoo K

Apr 26, 2020

Good !

By Adam S

Jun 21, 2016

Good learning materials, however the assignments are designed for compute science students rather than professional software developers as the most important part of the assignments is not parallel code, but it is algorithms. Yes, there is parallel code in the code of the assignments, but it is mostly written and your task is to implement the algorithm using this existing parallel code, while in my opinion it should be the other way around - you should implement parallel code and algorithms code should be already provided for you.

By Aleh V

Mar 3, 2017

Wrongly assumes that it'll be easier for students to jump from the conventional 'parallel' java paradigms and constructs to parallel streams.

Not a good job on explaining why. It'll require from students some efforts to create the right picture in their minds.

Exercises are great and partially make up for the above mentioned shortcomings.

Some example code is very bad and goes against all the 'good' things being taught by Martin in the first course of the specialization.

By Valerio M

Nov 27, 2016

Interesting course, but far too short. It ends up giving a quick introduction to some of the aspects of parallel programming. I enjoyed the assignments, apart from last one where the difficulty was more about the context of the example than any parallel programming aspects. That example, extended, could be a good capstone project, but I think it was not appropriate as a course assignment. I prefer courses that follow a book, and this course didn't.

By 家伟 陈

Dec 21, 2017

Not friendly with beginners in Scala. You will be presented with tons of Scala code with minimal detailing on algorithms. Obviously the lecture expects you to be quite familiar with Java and Scala. And the lecture is not very informative either (at least for green hands in Scala). I found that the best way that works for me is to pause at each slide, study the code, and then go on to see what the lecture has to say.

By Sangam K

Sep 30, 2017

I didn't like the last assignment. I didn't think there was much to learn there. I would've liked to implement more splitters and combiners. I did like the first 3 assignments very much. The lectures were pretty good, but I found myself loving some, and hating the others. I would've preferred more practical applications over theory. I think the lectures are un-necessarily math heavy.

By Hadrien H

Dec 20, 2016

Content is good, less well polished than Odersky's courses though. Painful exercises with a lot of time spent on understanding the instructions instead of focusing on learning parallelism methods (especially the final assignment). Overall happy to have learnt from this, but clarity of assignments should be improved.

By Andy D

Jan 14, 2017

In my view, this course was nowhere near as good as the earlier courses by Prof Odersky. The materials and pacing seemed all over the place - in some cases excessive time was spent going through quite trivial concepts, while elsewhere the course seemed quite rushed when looking at much more complicated ideas.

By Ostap O

Jul 25, 2021

The course does a good job introducing the concepts for parallel programming, however fails to introduce the libraries and programming concepts the assignments use to bring parallel algorithms to life. Would be great to have week 2 or 3 go over the tools to bridge this gap.

By Shad A

Apr 1, 2017

This course could have been better in my opinion, if we could have exercise that would deal with the concepts in more detail. I felt myself involved deeply in understanding the problem statement, rather than practicing the concepts explained in the course.

By Federico L

Aug 5, 2017

Good content. Very basic overview of parallel programming algorithms and data structures in scala. Course feel a little bit hacked together although not as bad as the Functional Program Design one.

Course should be more in depth.

By masaaki f

Mar 31, 2017

Online video is OK. But assignments are not much related to parallel programming specific issues. One case, this is my opinion but it's nice if students learn how scala solves "The dining philosophers" issue.

By Pavel O

Oct 2, 2016

Good course. But I have a strong feeling that would be nice to have more focus on the practice. Some lecture not really much with the results of assignments. Good course anyway. Pavel

By Rudolf Z

Sep 20, 2017

Most of assignments are good. They show applications of parallel programming very well. Some lectures are booring? but important. For instance, lectures about assotiativity.

By Shriraj B

Mar 24, 2020

The content presented definitely is good, but in the assignment the things used could be explained in the lectures for better understanding of learners.

By Luis V

Nov 9, 2017

Good course and good level on the assignments but needs a lot of improvement on the lectures, specially in the two last weeks.

By Sergey

Sep 30, 2020

Хочется получить опыт работы с примитивами scala для параллельного программирования, а не с готовыми болванками

By Joseph L

Jul 31, 2017

Lectures are not easy to understand. It almost feels like they plucked various sections from a longer course.

By Carlos V

Jun 19, 2020

No presentaba los topicos que deseaba. Ya no deseo el cruso, y no se muestra como darme de baja.

By Igor M

Oct 24, 2017

There are not clear test errors, that points to another place in code where mistake is placed.

By Gabriel G

Oct 30, 2016

Deep lectures, but exercises where more about complex problems than about parallel programing

By Igor W

Jun 12, 2017

Too much imperative technics in this "functional" parallel programming course.