This course will provide students with a selection of recent advances in software engineering such as multi-threaded, parallel and distributed programming along with some of the challenges and outstanding problems. The course aims at making students aware of key aspects of current software engineering research and to familiarize them with the state-of-the-art research in parallel and distributed programming. Topics to be treated include: introduction to parallel processing, parallel algorithms, complexity and parallel computation models, PRAM shared-memory model algorithms, shared memory implementations, sorting and selection networks, search acceleration circuits, sorting and routing on mesh architectures, hypercubes and their algorithms, task scheduling.