About this 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.
Taught by: Prof. Viktor Kuncak, Associate Professor
School of Computer and Communication Sciences
Taught by: Dr. Aleksandar Prokopec, Principal Researcher
Oracle Labs
| Basic Info |
Course 3 of 5 in the
Functional Programming in Scala Specialization.
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| Level | Intermediate |
| Language | English |
| How To Pass | Pass all graded assignments to complete the course. |
| User Ratings |
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I find the contents (theory behind) more challenging to follow than previous courses on the specialization, the nice thing is that the practical exercises are built so that they are still manageable and a good help to understand the lessons. I am missing Scala's actor model in this course, why is not there?
A very good course which teaches the techniques of Parallel Programming. Anyone wishing to upgrade their knowledge about Parallel Programming, should take this course. The principles are applicable universally, so you can take back the learnings and apply them in your work!
Overall the course was really good. I think the first 2 courses explained things a little bit better though.
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Quite advanced for someone with little background in parallel processing. The learning curve is not too steep, though, and the concepts sink in at a steady pace. The assignments are quite interesting as well; they manage to keep them enough real-life to make them interesting while simplifying them enough so learning the concept is not obscured by too much clutter.