Using Phoenix++ MapReduce to introduce undergraduate students to parallel computing

With the release of CS2013, departments around the country are injecting more parallelism into their core computer science courses. MapReduce is an attractive option for introducing undergraduate students to parallelism. However, most approaches to teaching MapReduce require students to access a Hadoop cluster. This is often too costly to be a viable option at many institutions, especially if MapReduce represents a minor topic in a course. In this paper, we discuss the use of Phoenix++ MapReduce for introducing undergraduate students to parallel computing and the MapReduce paradigm. We publish an open-source module on Phoenix++, enabling instructors at other institutions to rapidly adopt Phoenix++ MapReduce for use in their own curricula.

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