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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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51 - 75 of 273 Reviews for Parallel programming

By Janis R

Jun 17, 2016

Week 2 assignment was very interesting, thanks. Week 4 assignment was extremely hard to debug. Could you perhaps add more unit tests to BarnesHutSite?

By Ivelina G

Jul 5, 2016

A very good course, the theories are explained well in the lectures and the assignments cover the learned information without being too difficult

By Bruno M

Dec 3, 2018

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

the Big Data Analysis with Scala and Spark course.

By 张诺舟

Feb 21, 2017

very good course. It will be better if more reading material could be offered. The content in the lecture is a little bit hard to understand.

By Michael D

May 10, 2018

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

By Rohan V

Nov 26, 2019

More emphasis on Parallel Data Structures is needed, course is relatively simple as compared to previous courses from same specialisation

By Yin J X

Jul 10, 2017

Wish Mr. Odersky would've taught this course as well but it quickly lived up to my expectations. I really enjoyed doing the assignments.

By Christoph K

Nov 27, 2018

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

By Oleg O

Jul 2, 2017

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

By Tib O

Feb 4, 2017

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

By Josue G T I

Sep 2, 2018

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

By Roman A

May 20, 2020

It's an interesting and useful course, but I was surprised it's not contain any information about Futures and Promises.

By Tao W

Feb 28, 2018

This course is not simple, and the second assignment is hard. But I made it through, and happy with the achievement.

By Bruno F

Aug 20, 2017

Great course -- I learned a lot.

Parts of it were very heavy too, and not all of the lecture material was examined.

By Kanchi U

Jun 24, 2021

Concepts are nicely explained and the exercises are interesting and there is enough information to complete them.

By crow f

Aug 7, 2016

The material in the course is not complete, but it's perfect as introductory course in parallel programming.

By Mehdi

Jan 14, 2020

Excellent course !!! A must take in my opinion for a better and deep understanding of parallel programming.

By Prashant P

Oct 25, 2016

This is a great course that helps you develop thinking in terms of parallel implementation of the problems.

By Fernando R

Apr 22, 2018

The course provides a deep dive into Parallel Programming with Scala, and is well worth the time invested.

By Benji T

Jun 13, 2016

The content of the course is great, will review this course again as i think i left out some concepts.

By Alexander Z Q

Aug 27, 2017

Course with excellent content, methodology and teacher. It was an extraordinary learning experience

By Seongsan K

Mar 3, 2018

I really loved how well organized the course was and how well the professors explain the concepts.

By Patrick M

Feb 13, 2017

Quite interesting but sometimes I would have spent some minutes more to explain some core concept.

By Djibril N

May 14, 2020

Great Course. The details are quite the right amount, but more exercise could have been included.

By Paulo R d O C

Sep 12, 2018

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