Letting future programmers experience performance-related tasks

Abstract Programming courses usually focus on software-engineering problems like software decomposition and code maintenance. While computer-science lessons emphasize algorithm complexity, technological problems are usually neglected although they may significantly affect the performance in terms of wall time. As the technological problems are best explained by hands-on experience, we present a set of homework assignments focused on a range of technologies from instruction-level parallelism to GPU programming to cluster computing. These assignments are a product of a decade of development and testing on live subjects – the students of three performance-related software courses at the Faculty of Mathematics and Physics of the Charles University in Prague.