GOVERNMENT

NCSA's first-ever webinar on Feb. 12 brought together 41 scientists, students and researchers from places like Maine, Argentina and Wyoming and introduced them to the CUDA programming language.

"We used the webinar format so we could reach more people and eliminate the need for people to travel to attend," says Sandie Kappes the webinar's organizer and leader of NCSA's training group.

The webinar was delivered using the Elluminate Web conferencing software. In order to participate, attendees just needed a Web browser that supports Java and speakers at their workstation, says Kappes. Audio was transmitted via voice-over-Internet protocol, or VoIP, instead of conference call, which made costs minimal.

The webinar's goal, Kappes said, was to introduce participants to the CUDA programming language needed to take advantage of the accelerator technology recently made available on NCSA's Lincoln cluster, which combines the general-purpose graphics processing processors of NVIDIA Tesla units with conventional processors.

"It was very successful," says Kappes. "Usage of Lincoln has increased since the webinar, and most of the new users were webinar attendees."

Attendees who completed an online evaluation after the webinar were very positive in their responses regarding the tutorial content and delivery format. One hundred percent of the respondents said they would be interested in attending future workshops and tutorials delivered in this webinar format. Because of the webinar's success, NCSA plans to conduct quarterly webinars to enable effective use of its TeraGrid resources, said Kappes.

Galen Arnold, instructor and system engineer at NCSA, presented the three-hour webinar, walking the attendees through code, showing them some debugging techniques and demonstrating how MPI and CUDA could be used together.

"It was odd not looking at people and not making eye contact," says Arnold. "But the real difference from a live classroom was the ability of the attendees to talk to each other."

Attendees heard Arnold but were not able to verbally communicate with him or other participants. Instead, they communicated through a chat window as Arnold gave his presentation.

Arnold says he was surprised that people stayed to chat after the end of the webinar. "The webinar ran longer than we expected," he says. "People continued to chat just like they would if they were hanging around after class. They were still asking questions and discussing other ideas among themselves."

Arnold wants to try using a chat in a real classroom the next time he gives workshop. "I want to see this happen again and see how this works with people sitting in the same room," he says. "Networking with people doing the same programming is really important for people who attend these events."