CUDA

So after the great experience with the Scala course on coursera, I've decided to give a go to other courses. I've recently come across udacity, which has quite a few less courses but most of them are focused on computer science and seem to be of quite high quality.

I've signed up for Introduction to Artificial Intelligence, taught by  Peter Norvig himself, author of Artificial intelligence: a modern approach, a real classic on AI, which I hope will help as an easy refresher on the theory of AI. I'm also enrolled on the future Interactive 3D Graphics, which will be taught by Eric Haines, one of the authors of Real-Time Rendering, which is a real gem on computer graphics.

But boy, what I'm really enjoying right now is this one: Introduction to Parallel Programming. It's a collaboration with some guys from Nvidia and they are teaching parallel programming on the GPU using CUDA. Now, I did some basic MPI programming for clusters in C at university and have some professional experience writing multi-threaded code but this is an entirely different world. It's giving me the chance to learn some new concepts and get hands my dirty with a new technology, which is really fun. I was also hyper excited when they started talking about Map and Reduce operations, which I got to deal with during the Scala course.