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.

Undergraduate education

The Blue Waters project is collaborating with Shodor to provide an Undergraduate Petascale Education Program that works with faculty and students at a diverse range of institutions across the country, including two- and four-year colleges and universities, minority-serving institutions, EPSCoR institutions, and research universities. For more information on undergraduate programs, see http://www.shodor.org/petascale/.

This effort includes developing materials for undergraduate faculty to use in preparing a diverse community of students for petascale computing. Completed curriculum modules can be found at: http://www.shodor.org/petascale/materials/modules/.

An Undergraduate Petascale Internship program connects students interested in research or education projects involving high-performance computing with faculty. A list of current and past interns and their projects is online at: http://www.shodor.org/petascale/people/internsMentors/.

Graduate education

The researchers of tomorrow don't always receive thorough training in computational methods as part of their graduate research.

"Computer science departments typically focus on topics that computer scientists need to know, while in 'domain' science and engineering departments, courses focus on applications of simulation to those disciplines. Many aspects of the nuts and bolts of computational science then fall between the cracks," explained Michigan professor Sharon Glotzer.

To address that gap, the Virtual School of Computational Science and Engineering was launched in 2008, offering summer workshops to teach computational skills to graduate students from all disciplines from across the United States. Materials from past classes can be found online:

• Proven Algorithmic Techniques for Many-core Processors (2011)
• Petascale Programming Environments and Tools (2011)
• Petascale Programming Tools and Environments (2010)
• Big Data for Science (2010)
• Scaling to Petascale (2009)
• Many Core Processors (2010)
  This course was also offered in 2009 and 2008.

Training

Workshops provide scientists and engineers with the knowledge and expertise needed to develop applications for petascale computers, particularly Blue Waters.

• Winter 2011 PRAC Workshop (December 13-16, 2011)
• Using Eclipse (webinar, Dec. 10, 2010)
• I/O systems (webinar, Sep. 27, 2010)
• Fall PRAC Workshop (Oct. 18-20, 2010):
  This workshop provided details about the Blue Waters system and how to prepare applications to take best advantage of IBM's POWER7 multicore chips and the innovative interconnection network linking them. Tools were described and demoed for software development and workflow, performance data collection, debugging, visualization, data movement and storage, application performance simulation, and dynamic load balancing. Additional topics included scientific libraries, advanced programming models, and fault tolerance.
• SIMD Coding (webinar, Aug. 6, 2010)
• Performance tools on Blue Drop (webinar, July 9, 2010)
• General info for PRACs (webinar, June 16, 2010)
• Blue Waters PRAC Workshop (April 26-28, 2010)
• Blue Waters Performance Modeling Workshop (March 25-26, 2010):
  This workshop covered on analytical performance models for petascale applications, training participants in the use of performance modeling techniques.
• Getting Started with Performance Tools (webinar, Feb. 25, 2010)
• General info for PRACs (webinar, Feb. 12, 2010)
• PRAC Process (webinar, Feb. 1, 2010):
  This webinar described the process for gaining access to the Blue Waters supercomputer through the National Science Foundation's Petascale Computing Resource Allocation (PRAC) program, including tips on writing a successful PRAC proposal.
• Communication-Intensive Algorithms and Applications (Oct. 15-17, 2008)

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

The Blue Waters project and TeraGrid also have held several joint workshops:

• 2011 Symposium on Data-Intensive Analysis, Analytics, and Informatics
• 2010 Extreme Scale I/O and Data Analysis Workshop
• 2009 Fault Tolerance for Extreme-Scale Computing Workshop
• 2008 Extreme Scalability Workshop