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

4.6
stars
1,201 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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176 - 200 of 256 Reviews for Parallel Programming in Java

By Antonio J M G

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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

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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

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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

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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.

By Anton O

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Dec 17, 2017

Good course. I've expected less theory and more practice, but all in all I'm happy with the course. Block about parallel streams was the most useful for me. On the other hand part about array multiplication was quiet useless from practical point of view.

By Abid A S

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Apr 18, 2020

Was quite helpful... cleared many basic concepts in parallel programming ... but you should come up more industry oriented examples .. code samples uses rice university's own package in some examples..these could be done with regular java libraries

By Artur G

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Aug 4, 2017

This course is quite a shot one. The lectures are condense and programming assignments are purely academic. However I still would suggest to take it if one wants to learn about high level abstraction upon parallel computing in Java.

By Cyril A

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Jan 22, 2019

Materials are informative. Instructor is good. Good to have programming assignments to practice the material learned. Assignments after assignment 2 were a little light though. The first two assignments were at a good level though.

By erdem o

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Dec 10, 2017

It was a useful course, but last two homeworks were exactly same as professor explained in demo implementations. I would expect them to take a bit more time and having a variety of easy/difficult tasks in each homework.

By Donghe X

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Mar 17, 2019

Thanks for the course materials! I'm getting a lot of new knowledges from the course for cs fundamentals. I'd like to suggest to have more concrete examples to explain many concepts like SPAN, signal and put, etc.

By Jimmy C C

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Jun 25, 2020

Great introduction to parallel programming. Lectures were clear, summaries were helpful, quizzes were not trivial, discussion forum is good, but the assignments' grading system could be improved.

By Sagnik D

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May 26, 2020

I found the explanation of how to precisely code phasors lacking as the Thread stuff was already provided in sample code and never explained. Quite satisfied with the rest of the course though.

By Krishna K

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Jun 19, 2018

Excellent Course.I always wanted a good course on java concurrency and parallel programming.And finish->async, isolated, forAsync constructs are awesome.I have learnt much from this course.

By Elias R

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Jul 28, 2019

Very good and comprehensive video lectures! Sometimes the auto-grader results from Coursera fluctuate from one submission to the other, but overall it was a really interesting course.

By Valdas Ž

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Nov 7, 2017

Very useful course about parallel programming theory and practice.

Could be less examples with custom libraries instead of standard java features looking to practical usage at work.

By J.Pruthvi C

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Sep 8, 2021

Good introduction to the concepts of parallel programming, the programming assignments were a bit easy though and could be made harder to improve the learning experience.

By Vaibhav G

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Jun 3, 2020

Very well structured, taught and paced course, I only wish it had a passing project which would have given us more hands on practice and insights to parallel programming.

By Sebastiaan V

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Sep 24, 2018

The information found in this course is great. The first and second mini projects were of average difficulty, but the third and fourth mini projects were too trivial.

By Naveen K

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Jul 5, 2020

Explanation of theory was best. But Assignments lacked clarity. For example, we might expect little more clarification about threads In order to use them effectively

By Aykut B

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Jan 28, 2018

Instructor is awesome. However instead of sharing ready libraries for parallelism (like forall loop) in section 3, native codes should be used for forall loops etc.

By Sarvasva R

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Aug 30, 2017

Introduction to theoretical concepts was good, but not very deep. The exercises didn't really contribute much to my understanding of the course material in general.

By Yasmin E

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Feb 27, 2019

This course explain the concepts in a great way but the exercises

needs to be more rich with problems to enhance our understanding to the concepts.

By Thatiana F

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Sep 5, 2017

A great course, but I think it would be even better if only the structures from Java 8 were used, and not the functons build by the Rice University.

By Akshat A

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Sep 6, 2018

Great material, well arranged course flow, willing teacher, and nice project snippets. More coding samples and projects could have been included.

By Felix C

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Jun 6, 2021

The last split average array example can have more graphic to illustrate for ease to understand the problem and solution for the last project.