Utilizing parallelism at the instruction level is an important way to improve performance. Because the time spent in loop execution dominates total execution time, a large body of optimizations focuses on decreasing the time to execute each iteration. Software pipelining is a technique that reforms the loop so that a faster execution rate is realized. Iterations are executed in overlapped fashion to increase parallelism. Let { ABC } n represent a loop containing operations A, B, C that is executed n times. Although the operations of a single iteration can be parallelized, more parallelism may be achieved if the entire loop is considered rather than a single iteration. The software pipelining transformation utilizes the fact that a loop { ABC } n is equivalent to A { BCA } n −1 BC . Although the operations contained in the loop do not change, the operations are from different iterations of the original loop. Various algorithms for software pipelining exist. A comparison of the alternative methods for software pipelining is presented. The relationships between the methods are explored and possibilities for improvement highlighted.

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PANEL SUMMARYThe number of undergraduates entering computer science has declined in recent years. This is paralleled by a drop in the number of high school students taking the CS AP exam and the number of high schools offering computer science courses. The declines come at a time when career opportunities in CS continue to grow and computer science graduates are seen as crucial in building a globally competitive workforce for the 21 st century. Efforts aimed at reversing the declining interest in computer science include curriculum revisions at the undergraduate level at many institutions, a re-design of computer science AP courses [1], and the inclusion of computational thinking into disciplines outside computer science [3].This panel discusses four projects of computer science researchers collaborating with high school teachers on integrating computing and computational thinking into their courses. The majority of the high school teachers involved is teaching science and math courses. They are teaching a diverse group of talented and college-bound students. The goal of all projects is to integrate computing into disciplines represented in the high school curriculum and to raise the awareness of computer science as an exciting and intellectually rewarding field. This panel will outline recent and on-going activities and interaction with high school teachers. Each panelist will describe how he/she got involved and the nature of the interaction. The panelists will talk about their individual projects, outline their visions for future interactions, and how their effort can be replicated by others. The session will briefly describe NSF's RET program which provided teacher support for three of the four projects. The session will then be opened for discussion; the audience will be encouraged to ask questions and contribute additional ideas for the inclusion of computational thinking in high school courses.The "Science Education in Computational Thinking (SECANT)'' project at Purdue University collaborated with two high school physics teachers to incorporate selected material of the Matter&Interaction (M&I) Curriculum with computational thinking principles into high school physics courses [3]. The high school course includes three weeks of Python programming focusing on computational methods and visualizations crucial to the M&I Curriculum. Lab material developed within this project gives a first introduction to programming. Throughout the school year, students use computation to illustrate and simulate physical principles and models, and they apply computational thinking concepts. The computational concepts include designing repeated processes through iterations, determining how data generated is stored and represented, abstracting and generalizing physical processes, and visualizing the collected data to observe patterns and other phenomena.This approach is currently implemented in the AP Physics course. The high school devotes a full year to AP Physics and has some flexibility on what material to cover. Introducing ...

Our work is situated in research on Computer Science (CS) learning in informal learning environments and literature on the factors that influence girls to enter CS. In this article, we outline design choices around the creation of a summer programming camp for middle school youth. In addition, we describe a near-peer mentoring model we used that was influenced by Bandura's self-efficacy theory. The purpose of this article, apart from promoting transparency of program design, was to evaluate the effectiveness of our camp design in terms of increasing youths’ interest, self-efficacy beliefs, and perceptions of parental support. We found significant gains for all three of these concepts. Additionally, we make connections between our design choices (e.g., videos, peer support, mentor support) and the affective gains by thematically analyzing interview data concerning the outcomes found in our camps.

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