This paper presents an overview of the "Applied Parallel Computing" course taught to final year Software Engineering undergraduate students in Spring 2014 at NUST, Pakistan. The main objective of the course was to introduce practical parallel programming tools and techniques for shared and distributed memory concurrent systems. A unique aspect of the course was that Java was used as the principle programming language. The course was divided into three sections. The first section covered parallel programming techniques for shared memory systems that include multicore and Symmetric Multi-Processor (SMP) systems. In this section, Java threads was taught as a viable programming API for such systems. The second section was dedicated to parallel programming tools meant for distributed memory systems including clusters and network of computers. We used MPJ Express-a Java MPI library-for conducting programming assignments and lab work for this section. The third and the final section covered advanced topics including the MapReduce programming model using Hadoop and the General Purpose Computing on Graphics Processing Units (GPGPU).

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Universities working in Pakistan are offering a comprehensive set of degree programs for different levels. Virtual University of Pakistan is country's first institution completely based on modern information and communication technologies. It offers education in many different majors and various areas of study are available. Multiple courses are offered in each program that satisfy several general requirements of degree.Selection of courses that align with competency and interest can become an important factor in determining final score (CGPA) of student. For this purpose, a web-based course recommender system specifically designed for courses offered at Virtual University is developed. User-based collaborative filtering and ratingprediction approach is used for calculation of expected marks and grades. System is tested against 470 currently available courses and simulated data of 2600 students. Test results showed that expected marks are somehow dependent on student's average marks in already studied courses and average marks of similar students in target course. Accuracy of implemented system is measured using Mean Absolute Error for 100 observations. MAE value came out to be in acceptable range.