Learner Reviews & Feedback for Parallel programming by École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne

should contain more details

exercise are too heavy

I must admit I am very disappointed with this course.

First of all - provided unit tests are inadequate. To say the least. They do not cover all functionalities that are to be implemented. Of course I could write my own unit tests. If I only knew what I was supposed to do... Yep, a few times my own tests passed but tested functionality was turned down by coursera tests with a perfect message like "assertion failed". Great, I know this. But I want to know what exactly failed without having to guess and reuploading solution dozens of times. I wasn't able to max out the last assignment (I did 9/10) due to another obscure assertion message - "body not found in right sector" and have no idea what was wrong and which body were not in which sector. Message that something went wrong without any details is like no message at all. Implemented functionality is rather straightforward so I suspect something went wrong in previously implemented methods which were accepted by coursera. Moreover I was able to pass one method implementation just by simply filling the whole matrix with one specific value which proves rather poor quality of the tests.

Second thing - this is very academic course. Very. I doubt anyone will find it useful in real life unless you are a student or maybe a teacher.

Generally I feel like I wasted my time here. Sorry.

UPDATE: I am a completionist so I finally managed to max the last assignement out with some guessing and of course like I expected I had a bug in some old method (poor coursera tests had accepted it) but I am still dissapointed and can't imagine why I would need this whole stuff in the real life. What I learnt here is guessing and "hacking" coursera tests.

The course presents two core approaches to parallel programming - task and data parallelism. While these concepts are really useful, I expected more details on, for example, how to implement the _parallel_ construct used throughout the lectures. The materials were good and I can use some of the ideas straight after the lectures in my everyday coding, but the assignments were really slightly related to the topic.

Barnes Hut simulation assignment. I'd say it has nothing in common with parallel programming in Scala. It looks like the authors looked for some real-life example or use case for Combiners and this simulation model looked nice. But, really, does any developer not working in university would ever use it? It's completely impractical, the most of the time I spent reading the description of simulation model, but the coding itself was just playing with 2D coordinates and some basic recursion. I'd expect something more practical, e.g. implementing simplified form of Hadoop map-reduce or something like that so I can use it after the course. But Barnes-Hut is too specific and is pretty far from everyday problems developers encounter.

For a while, that's the worst course of scala specialization. All the parallelism is just obvious division of a one big piece on several small pieses, and perfrom parrallel tasks on it. It's enogh to write merge sort with several threads to get the main idea, which is proposed here. You don't need to watch 4 weeks of coursera video and perform tasks to get it. Maybe I'm wrong, but I expected something more than trivial division. Besides that, I don't like the tasks. And I hate the last one week. Very bad description of the problem, it made me really suffer. I'd like much more the first 2 courses. Which I rated as 5 and 4 accordingly, but this one is fail. Besides that, I like the theory about parallel and concurent programming, and all the stuff about "iron". Hope the 4th one course will be better.

I really don't liked how you are forced to implement a logic you can barely understand by looking at the minimal assignment text. I mean, what the heck. I thought this course (or courses) were supposed to teach you specific subjects like parallel programming. Not how you compute the centerX based on four quads in a fork? I mean. come one. At least explain enough so that it's at least remotely possible to implement the core logic in the start of week 4. I mean, how should I know that the size of a fork is <spoiler>? (yup, can't tell if even if you pointed a gun at me)

Excellent lectures, let down by the difficulty of the assignments.

While the tutors clearly know their stuff, I found the assignments really quite challenging and of limited educational value due to the mixture of new concepts introduced by the lectures along with new (to me) mathematics or CS that also needed to be grasped.

I'm an experienced professional programmer with the EPFL 'FP in Scala' and FRP courses under my belt, so I thought I knew what to expect but this was much more time consuming than I'd thought.

The course, especially the last assignment is too overloaded with math that is not really needed during everyday engineering. I understand that that particle collision simulation is classic example and we've all studied it in college. But common, all particle simulations are already implemented. Give people smth they need during their every-day engineering work.

И пожалуйста, покормите Виктора, по голосу такое ощущение, что совсем ослабел.

This course is definitely too low level for me, it is also very scientific computation oriented. It was an interesting parenthesis in this cursus, but not with the time taken. Lesson emphasis too much on specific implementation tricks, and are sometimes hard to follow. Also coding style differs greatly from coding style of other lessons (lots of mutability, intensive usage of explicit loops).

While some the material was useful, I was extremely disappointed with this course. The first two lectures were nearly intolerable to listen to, and the last assignment was very poorly designed and documented. I would not recommend this course to anyone unless it was significantly redesigned and updated.

The approach in this course is incorrect, I think that will be a course with more concret examples, but is a course with a lot of teory that is not applied.

It's difficult to follow the content. The way it is organized could be greatly improved.

Rather theoretical introduction to the basics of an interesting subject. Regretfully examples and assignments are frequently overly complex in areas which are unrelated to the subject. In addition, people who work with software development should expect to look further if they aim to add to their toolbox.

Some exercises need some improvement. Tests were not that helpful and the instruction to the last homework was quite bad (many open questions).

The code examples in this course are extremely convoluted. In particular, please don't put multiple statements per line...

Academical with close to no real life value.

to much math