Education, outreach, and training

Taking full advantage of the opportunities that follow from fielding a petascale computing system requires a long-term coordinated effort to educate and train the next generation of scientists and engineers. This effort must excite, recruit, educate, and retain students as well as educational professionals. Partners in the Great Lakes Consortium for Petascale Computation are critical to the Blue Waters education initiatives.

Learn more about undergraduate and graduate education at http://www.greatlakesconsortium.org/education/.

Applications and Training Program

The Applications and Training Program consists of a semi-annual series of workshop that provide scientists and engineers with the knowledge and expertise needed to develop applications for petascale computers. Topics covered in these workshops will include:

• Computer architecture (particularly Blue Waters)
• Compilers and libraries (e.g. MPI, FFT, matrix operations, etc.)
• Techniques for achieving high performance on tens to hundreds of thousands of cores
• Debugging, performance and validation tools
• I/O and archival storage functionality
• Data analysis and visualization
• Co-processor utilization for applications
• Application development environments (e.g., Eclipse)
• Application frameworks (e.g., Cactus)

For more information on online training and training events, see: http://www.ncsa.illinois.edu/UserInfo/Training/.