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Learner Reviews & Feedback for Parallel Programming in Java by Rice University

4.6
stars
1,191 ratings

About the Course

This course teaches learners (industry professionals and students) the fundamental concepts of parallel programming in the context of Java 8. Parallel programming enables developers to use multicore computers to make their applications run faster by using multiple processors at the same time. By the end of this course, you will learn how to use popular parallel Java frameworks (such as ForkJoin, Stream, and Phaser) to write parallel programs for a wide range of multicore platforms including servers, desktops, or mobile devices, while also learning about their theoretical foundations including computation graphs, ideal parallelism, parallel speedup, Amdahl's Law, data races, and determinism. Why take this course? • All computers are multicore computers, so it is important for you to learn how to extend your knowledge of sequential Java programming to multicore parallelism. • Java 7 and Java 8 have introduced new frameworks for parallelism (ForkJoin, Stream) that have significantly changed the paradigms for parallel programming since the early days of Java. • Each of the four modules in the course includes an assigned mini-project that will provide you with the necessary hands-on experience to use the concepts learned in the course on your own, after the course ends. • During the course, you will have online access to the instructor and the mentors to get individualized answers to your questions posted on forums. The desired learning outcomes of this course are as follows: • Theory of parallelism: computation graphs, work, span, ideal parallelism, parallel speedup, Amdahl's Law, data races, and determinism • Task parallelism using Java’s ForkJoin framework • Functional parallelism using Java’s Future and Stream frameworks • Loop-level parallelism with extensions for barriers and iteration grouping (chunking) • Dataflow parallelism using the Phaser framework and data-driven tasks Mastery of these concepts will enable you to immediately apply them in the context of multicore Java programs, and will also provide the foundation for mastering other parallel programming systems that you may encounter in the future (e.g., C++11, OpenMP, .Net Task Parallel Library)....

Top reviews

LG

Dec 12, 2017

This is a great course in parallel programming. The videos were very clear, summaries reinforced the video material and the programming projects and quizzes were challenging but not overwhelming.

SV

Aug 27, 2017

Great course. Introduces Parallel Programming in Java in a gentle way.

Kudos to Professor Vivek Sarkar for simplifying complex concepts and presenting them in an elegant manner.

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151 - 175 of 251 Reviews for Parallel Programming in Java

By s v s g

Apr 30, 2020

very good

By Marcos N F

May 3, 2019

Excelente

By ASTHA B

Sep 29, 2021

Awesome

By Jonathan H

Sep 27, 2018

awesome

By Vitalii D

Nov 16, 2020

Good!

By Burhan u H Z

Jan 21, 2021

Good

By John A

Sep 2, 2020

A great course to learn the basics of thread-level parallel programming using the Java API. I had never used ForkJoin or other parallelism libraries which were recently added to the Java API before, and from taking this class I was able to gain both practical experience with these libraries and learn the theory behind their use. The lectures were well organized and effectively transitioned between examples and topics, making the content easy to understand. The quizzes were comprehensive enough to completely test your understanding of the material but still had a reasonable difficulty.

The weakest part of this class was probably the mini-projects. Some of them were too brief or trivial to get sufficient experience with the topics in this course. Solutions are also mainly evaluated based on execution time, which could vary significantly between trials of the same program -- enough that the same code could pass the autograder on some runs and fail on others.

In spite of this, I still would recommend this class to anyone who wants to learn about software parallelism. This course teaches a variety of ways to use parallelism to improve performance, as well as analyzing the challenges and obstacles in doing so. I have not taken the other two courses in this specialization yet, though I plan to soon.

By Mike D

Nov 6, 2017

This course has a good combination of clear lectures, helpful textual summaries, reasonable/helpful quizes, and decent weekly projects. If anything, I wish that the projects were a little more challenging. The first three were fairly easy and I wish that we had been required to implement them from scratch rather than having the starting version which required only minor modifications. The last project assignment was a little tricky because the lectures didn't cover all the details of phasers in sufficient detail, so studying additional documentation was required. Overall, I learned a lot and it was time well spent.

By Rhijul M

Dec 23, 2018

Although this was a very excellent course to understand various API's and methods that are exposed by Java SDK's (RecursiveTasks, Fork/Join Framework etc) and touched on very important multi-core parallelism aspects, I was left wanting for more fundamental explanations regarding how parallelism works under the hood (How the thread works, how the signalling between barrier synchronisation happens etc). Thanks, none the less. Looking forward to next course.

By Toriola O

Nov 13, 2020

I enjoyed the course and hoping to finish the specialization. Conclusively, my understanding of Parallelism has improved further.

It would have been 5-stars but there wasn't enough emphasis on the effect of hardware on the mini projects which in most cases led to avoidable waste of time of the course assignments.

My Advice to all current and prospective students is to be agile by uploading assignment incrementally to Coursera grader.

By Dipen L

Dec 28, 2020

Just the grader really, sometimes when iti's under heavy use then the results vary - but apart from that the videos are really special, you have to pay attention to detail when the videos are this compact - but that is what makes it really good. The assignments test what you've learnt and can sometimes be on the easy side - but that just means practicing on other things outside of course work. A truly wonderful learning experience.

By lowell s

Feb 28, 2019

Excellent lectures and provides good understanding of some theory behind Parallel Programming. The professor is a good lecturer and has a great format. Some assignments are very difficult due to the confusion between lecture notes which have errors and differences between the lecture and the notes. But well worth taking the course and understanding how to take advantage of multi-core processing.

By Nitant N J

Jul 7, 2020

This course covers many interesting topics of parallelism with java. This course is for all the ones who know the basics of java and want to learn something about parallelism. However, I do feel that sometimes this course just throws the topics at you and you have to dig deep by yourself. But yes many important topics are covered very well also the mini projects are very well designed.

By Syed A R

Nov 5, 2017

Having come from Python world, i have learned valuable concepts in parallel programming and related Java APIs, surely the APIs are much more elegant and powerful in Java. i was disappointed by Week's 3 and 4's assignment task, they were too easy, nevertheless learned a great lot of information. Excellent course for someone who is looking to get into parallel programming!

By Krishna A

Apr 4, 2018

Learnt a lot about parallel programming and the facilities offered in Java for the same. The best part is the videos are short and nice. However, I'm echoing some of the common sentiment, that the assignments (barring assignment 2) are too trivial, and sometimes are not clear what to do. They can be surely improved, so that students can deepen their understanding.

By Андрей С

Oct 28, 2017

This course is a good introduction to parallel programming,

but i noticed a number of shortcomings.

Some themes are not reflected in mini-projects:

- memoization in week 1;

- data flow and pipeline parallelism.

The mini-project for week 3 is too easy.

Some questions in the quiz in week 4 does not match the contents of the course.

By Ashwin K

Jun 12, 2020

I feel the course can have more theoretical foundations included as well. And the assignments should be more challenging and more explanatory as well to reinforce concepts in a better way. But otherwise, really good course to get started understanding async programming constructs. Helped me clear a lot of doubts that I had.

By Mitrofanov P

Nov 12, 2017

Tasks are too simple. All the information isn't covered in depth, so consider this course as a sort of introduction to the theory of parallel programming as well as many important Java language features. It gives you a basic idea and points you to the right direction in case you're interested in this complex topic.

By Ashutosh S

Dec 17, 2020

The content and presentation is very good. The exercises are very limited, and repeat of the problems in video lectures with minor variations in some cases. Also it is very frustrating to meet the benchmark performance on exercise. It passes on autograder fails locally so you just keep doing hit and trial.

By Diogene N

Oct 24, 2018

This course is a very nice introduction to parallel programming in Java. It highlights the key libraries to explores for production use. On thing I didn't like is that the programming assignments are a copy paste of the demonstration videos in the course. All in all I enjoyed taking this course!

By Robert C

Apr 5, 2022

I liked this course. I had time off so it took about a week's worth per day. I think more engaging mini projects would be helpful, but I understand it's hard - maybe slowly build something trhoughout the course to see moere real-world applications ( a bigger foundation codebase to build upon)

By Antonio J M G

May 4, 2018

Great content, thank you very much for putting this together. I have enjoyed reviewing the fundamentals and learn more about the Phaser's API. My only suggestion will be to add more exercises, even if they are optional, so people can practice more the concepts introduced.

By Benjamin G J

Aug 6, 2018

The exercises are just a little short and I'd like to see, maybe, twice as many quizzes with a better connection to lecture notes, but the lectures are very enlightening, the subject matter is very interesting, and the exercises, though excessively sparse, are helpful.

By Alban D

Apr 15, 2019

Very interesting content: it is definitely useful to get into that topic. Mini projects are sometimes a bit light: what has to be done is so simple that it can be frustrating... or misleading (I would expect to have more than a single line to change sometimes).

By Saifuddin M

Oct 15, 2017

I liked the course. It introduced some of the concepts in parallel programming very well. I would suggest if it focuses more on Java implementations from the java.util.concurrent package like Countdown Latches and Cyclic Barriers it would be more helpful.