I was studying for my MSc in CS some 25 years ago. Our curriculum included both automata/formal languages (multiple courses over multiple semesters) and parallel programming.
Since then, I've repeatedly felt that I've seriously benefited from my formal languages courses, while the same couldn't be said about my parallel programming studies. PVM is dead technology (I think it must have counted as "nearly dead" right when we were using it). And the only aspect I recall about the formal parallel stuff is that it resembles nothing that I've read or seen about distributed and/or concurrent programming ever since.
A funny old memory regarding PVM. (This was a time when we used landlines with 56 kbit/s modems and pppd to dial in to university servers.) I bought a cheap second computer just so I could actually "distribute" PVM over a "cluster". For connecting both machines, I used linux's PLIP implementation. I didn't have money for two ethernet cards. IIRC, PLIP allowed for 40 kbyte/s transfers! <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parallel_Line_Internet_Protoco...>
The latter course (a) was built on a mathematical formalism that had been developed at the university proper and not used anywhere else, (b) used PVM: <https://www.netlib.org/pvm3/>, <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parallel_Virtual_Machine>, for labs.
Since then, I've repeatedly felt that I've seriously benefited from my formal languages courses, while the same couldn't be said about my parallel programming studies. PVM is dead technology (I think it must have counted as "nearly dead" right when we were using it). And the only aspect I recall about the formal parallel stuff is that it resembles nothing that I've read or seen about distributed and/or concurrent programming ever since.
A funny old memory regarding PVM. (This was a time when we used landlines with 56 kbit/s modems and pppd to dial in to university servers.) I bought a cheap second computer just so I could actually "distribute" PVM over a "cluster". For connecting both machines, I used linux's PLIP implementation. I didn't have money for two ethernet cards. IIRC, PLIP allowed for 40 kbyte/s transfers! <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parallel_Line_Internet_Protoco...>