Learner Reviews & Feedback for Fundamentals of Parallelism on Intel Architecture by Intel

Nice course, really enjoyed every challenge in the course. Well laid out goals for a Computer Science student.

Please bring advance courses by Intel also such as FPGA based courses.

I think the course is to the point, simple and very informative. I never felt that I was doing an intermediate-level course. Thanks for giving access to the PBS cluster and XEON Phi processors. All your assignments really challenged the programmer inside me and loved them all. Recommended for everyone who wants to do parallel programming. I am eagerly waiting for more courses on these topics.

Best course to understand the basics of parallel programming , this course covers the areas where parallelism can be performed and the hands on exercises hones your skills of what you have learnt.

It is worth to pay for certification, because it gives you graded software tools to evaluate your performance on given tasks.

Very well explained, very simple, well structured and interesting examples. Although, more diversity of the examples would be interesting, for example, mathematical operations (as matrix-matrix multiplication), bioinformatics, financial, and so on. Also, would be great more exercises, labs and resources.

Amazing course, I really loved it. This course provided me with a lot of knowledge about the subject Computer Architecture and Organisation. This course was really very interesting and I am really fortunate to study this course. Thank you Coursera!

I really learned a lot and enjoyed this course. I am much better versed at factorization, openMP and MPI as a result. I had experience with GPU programming but the methods here are vital for high end CPUs

I liked this course,fundamentals of parallelism is explained very clearly. The assignments were really good.

Muy bueno, enseña maneras muy poderosas de hacer el software mas rápido.

Хороший преподаватель, материал излагается приятно и доступно. Однако курс довольно поверхностный и потребуются дополнительные источники информации для базового освоения OpenMP и MPI. Есть презентации, но конспект лекций отсутствует.

I miss some mentor or instructor that provides some kind of support or reply to doubts in the forum. Seems that if we have a doubt, there is not any mentor that can help you. The level of the exercises doesn't correspond to the lessons.

So far, it is been not a pleasant experience.Sorry to say that I'm starting to wonder if it's worth the time spent in this course.

Very difficult for beginners in their preferred environment, they assume that you have ample amount of knowledge already.

1) No supervision from instructors.

2) Assignments are not very clear

3) Forums are dead

This course was designed (among other) for people who do scientific computations, but hardly know anything for optimizing the code for efficient use of the hardware. And it so happened, that I am EXACTLY from that category of people.

That was an incredible experience, that, no joke, allowed me to speed up my application for electrostatics problem by at least two orders of magnitude, which is crucial as I deal with very high numbers of atoms.

The only thing that makes me sad is that in this course, the second one is advertised, called "Performance optimization", yet it is absent from Coursera. Of the continuation course(s) ever happens to arrive here, I will sign up for it immediately.

Thanks!

This course will definitely help one to get started with vectorization, parallel computing, OpenMP, and MPI. It helped me learn about Intel's Xeon Phi architecture and various compiler optimization techniques. The hands-on lab tutorials and assignments are really helpful in understanding the topics. The instructor did a good job in explaining the subject and the provided study guides are very helpful too. I hope more intermediate courses regarding parallelism are introduced on Coursera.

Enthusiastic and articulate lecturer; logically well-organized courses; a dedicated lab for the assignments. If I have to say a con: Intel Architecture is not bound to Intel toolchain that requires royalty, so maybe it'd be better if the lecturer can mention some open equivalents (especially the switches) alongside the introduction to the Intel products.

Course is nicely structured, starting from vectorization, to shared-memory (OpenMP), cache-levels and finally distributed memory (MPI). Most of this can also be done on local machine without having access to a cluster - at least for testing purposes. The instructor explains each concept very well and in an easy to understand way.

the course was really great I learn many tricks and tips for code optimization and parallel programming in general and with the access provided by Colfax to their Xeon phi cluster, I was able to practice and experiment with my implementation and see the performance of the code.

many thanks to all people working on this course.

É um excelente curso sobre Programação Paralela, pois te introduz aos principais conceitos desde o zero e te permite desenvolver um conhecimento sólido devido aos exercícios desafiadores. Tenho um nível intermediário em Inglês e fiz o curso perfeitamente sem nenhuma dificuldade em entender o instrutor!

I really enjoyed this course. Workloads were interesting and I enjoyed solving problems with OpenMP and MPI as well as optimizing code performance. Good start for those who want to master parallel programming and understand performance optimization. Andrey is a great instructor, cudos to him.

This is the basic entrance level for parallel computing, briefly cover the things about openmp, mpi and other methods about it. The content is good and the exercise is easy to finish. I finish the exercise even without a compiler :) Just few lines and submit it, see if it works

Good introductory material on parallel computing and HPC with latest Intel hardware. Topics like OpenMP and MPI could perhaps have been covered in more details. Good practice assignments. Looking forward to the second part of this course, which promises to be a hoot.

Very interesting course! The exercises come with lectures are useful and practical. I highly recommend this course, especially for scientists and researchers who work with scientific applications but unfamiliar with parallelism.

This coursework helped me to know the working of Intel architecture. How to optimize the code over the existing architecture with the help of vectorization and multithreading.

Enjoyed learning basics of parallelism and different methods to improve the performance. Thanks to Andrey Vladimirov for the nice clear explanations on the topics!