|
|
Taking full advantage of extreme-scale computing requires educating and training the next generation of computational scientists and engineers. The Blue Waters project supports efforts to excite, recruit, educate, and retain both undergraduate and graduate students as well as educational professionals.
Scott Lathrop, Blue Waters technical program manager for education, describes the wide range of workshops, internships, and curriculum modules the project fosters and the impact of these efforts: Blue Waters Training Education and Outreach Impact.
EOT nav tabs
Undergraduate education
The Blue Waters project, in collaboration with the National Computational Science Institute (NCSI) and national high-performance computing programs, supports the Undergraduate Petascale Education Program, which promotes understanding and interest in petascale computing and its applications among undergraduate students and faculty through workshops, internships, and curricular materials.
More than 30 curriculum modules are available:
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:
Training
Workshops provide scientists and engineers with the knowledge and expertise needed to develop applications for petascale computers, particularly Blue Waters.
View the archived workshops
Training archive
- 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, Jul. 9, 2010)
- General info for PRACs (webinar, Jun. 16, 2010)
- Blue Waters PRAC Workshop (Apr. 26-28, 2010)
- Blue Waters Performance Modeling Workshop (Mar. 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 and XSEDE (formerly TeraGrid) projects have held several joint workshops:
|
