Bailey is great. Visit office hours and start the projects early. Not because they are particularly hard, but sometimes there's weird random speedbumps you need help from staff on.

Submitted Sun May 12 2024

Watch the lecture videos and take advantage of Bailey's live lectures and office hours. If you're stuck Bailey or a TA will help you. This is not a course where you will write a lot of code yourself, the majority is given as skeleton code with very little left for you to plug in. This course is an INTRODUCTION to the CONCEPT of parallel programming and is heavier on the data analysis than actual coding. I came into the class expecting to be bored and hate it, but I found I actually enjoyed it in the end. Just don't expect to write code.

Submitted Tue Jun 20 2023

This course has a pretty light load, but still manages to pack in a lot of useful information about parallel programming. I highly recommend this class, along with any other class taught by Professor Bailey. I would recommend taking 344 - Operating Systems before taking this class if possible. It was nice already being familiar with C/C++ coming into this class. However, if you can't I would still take this class. I chose to take this over 381 and have no regrets.

Submitted Tue Jun 20 2023

Start early and setting up and testing your environment. You may set up your environment locally only to find it doesn’t work for the current week’s assignment. Don’t be setting up ssh to osu resources at the last minute.

Submitted Mon Jun 19 2023

Don't worry if you are not strong in C or C++. I took this class partly as an introduction to C so that 344 didn't wreck me. I learned a lot from Professor Bailey. All the great reviews about him are true. He loves to teach. He personally offered three days of office hours each week in addition to the 1.5 hours of live lecture that he did. He truly wants you to understand the paradigm of parallel programming and he is very enthusiastic to teach you and take all your questions. He even encourages "lurking" during office hours in case you don't have a question but you want to learn from other students' questions. This class gives you a lot of starter code. I thought I was going to get lost the first week, but once I realized that he walks you through everything you need to know and takes all your questions, I really wanted to stick with the course because I wanted to experience a class with an professor that teaches this course live. His goal is to deliver the same course online as the course on campus. I can say I learned a lot about parallel programming and the paradigms for it, but I certainly don't feel like I'm ready to put this on my resume and talk about in an interview except in very general terms. I didn't know anything about parallel programming before taking this class but I am very happy that I spent an elective on this course. It was 100% worth it and lived up to the hype

Submitted Mon Jun 19 2023

I'd probably consider this as an ANALYSIS class more so than a PROGRAMMING class. I wrote at most 10 lines of code per project the entire quarter. That's how much starter code is given on this class. You'll spend more time analyzing, making graphs, and writing commentary on the results of the projects than actual coding. That said, I totally agree with what others have mentioned, Professor Bailey is such a joy to have! Almost all of the lecture videos are new, and he does live lectures each week - if that's not dedication and love for this subject, then I don't know what is. Take it if your looking for an easy A!

Submitted Sat Jun 17 2023

Watch all the videos, and do all the readings! Also, be sure to attend office hours for each assignment, plus the live lecture.

Submitted Tue Jun 13 2023

Prof Bailey was the first actual professor I've had in the program, and it brought be back to college 1.0. He's very nice and supportive, and you do learn the gist of parallel programming. My main complaint is that it was too easy. We get so much starter code that assignments can be coded in 10 minutes (often 5-10 lines of actual code, and sometimes just filling in 5-10 blanks). I would rank this class below the greats (IMHO 271, 261, and 381), but it's easily in the top half of classes I've taken in the program. It's refreshing to have a professor that really knows their stuff and loves teaching!

Submitted Mon Jun 12 2023

One of the best classes at OSU. Tons of learning from the course. It's a bit of work since the lectures are really long that requires you to watch the videos, but the professor does such a good job with the course that it's worth watching. Some of the projects get hard near the end, but most of it is understanding the lecture and adjusting a few lines of code he gives us. Would recommend this! No C/C++ experience needed

Submitted Fri Jul 01 2022

Everyone says it and I'll say it again, Professor Bailey is an s tier professor. Charming, approachable, and absurdly knowledgeable in his field. Each project starts with boilerplate code, and the comments make it pretty clear what you're supposed to do and why. Bailey has his own website which I wasn't a fan of at first (leaving canvas felt like an extra step), but having finished the course I totally get it. The grading for this course seemed pretty harsh at the start, but not having any weighting to quizzes/projects/tests + fairly lenient grading means you can get an A by putting in the bare minimum effort. If you're coming into this class, have a base competency in C/C++, compiling on OSU's different servers (os#, rabbit), and creating graphs in google sheets (this usually took me longer than the projects themselves lol)

Submitted Tue Jun 14 2022