Parallel Programming skills may require a long time to acquire. “Think in parallel” is a skill that requires time, effort, and experience. In this work, we propose to facilitate the students’ learning process in parallel programming by using instant messaging. Our aim was to find out whether students’ interaction through instant messaging tools is beneficial for the learning process. In order to do so, we asked several students of an HPC course of the Master’s degree in Computer Science of the University of León to develop a specific parallel application, each of them using a different application program interface: OpenMP, MPI, CUDA, or OpenCL. Even though the used APIs are different, there are common points in the design process. We encouraged students to interact with each other by using Gitter, an instant messaging tool for GitHub users. Our analysis of the communications and results demonstrate that the direct interaction of students through the Gitter tool has a positive impact on the learning process.

并行编程技能可能需要很长时间才能掌握。“并行思考”是一项需要时间，精力和经验的技能。在这项工作中，我们建议通过使用即时消息传递来促进学生在并行编程中的学习过程。我们的目的是找出学生通过即时消息工具进行的交互是否对学习过程有益。为此，我们要求莱昂大学计算机科学硕士学位的HPC课程的几个学生开发特定的并行应用程序，他们每个人都使用不同的应用程序接口：OpenMP，MPI，CUDA或OpenCL的。即使使用的API不同，在设计过程中也存在一些共同点。我们鼓励学生使用Gitter（一种面向GitHub用户的即时消息传递工具）相互交流。