OIL & GAS

On the heels of the National Science Foundation’s announcement of the "Engaging People in Cyberinfrastructure" (EPIC) collaboration, the Texas Advanced Computing Center (TACC) today announced it is a key partner in constructing a human capacity building infrastructure extending the cyberinfrastructure community to include a much larger number of talented and diverse people. TACC will contribute to the collaboration by providing new academic classes that will teach science and engineering students about parallel computing, visualization and data analysis, and grid computing. These classes will be packaged for sharing and distribution to other universities. The EPIC collaboration is comprised of a large national team with many long-time education, outreach and training (EOT) participants from across the country focused on interlinked and coordinated projects that will significantly increase the diversity and number of people that are learning about and applying cyberinfrastructure to address their research and educational needs. “Our new classes will provide formal, comprehensive training for the next generation of computational scientists and engineers to use advanced computing resources,” said Dr. Jay Boisseau, director of TACC and the institutional lead for the EPIC program. “We hope these classes will be of use to many other universities in the United States and the world.” EPIC's goal is to build human capacity by creating awareness and by educating and training a diverse group of people in all stages of life, from K-12 to professional practice, to fully participate in the cyberinfrastructure community as developers, users and leaders. The collaboration places a high priority on the evaluation of EPIC's programs, and the EPIC management structure, to coordinate and leverage the strengths and activities of all partners and their constituents. EPIC is supported through the Computer and Information Science and Engineering Directorate. EPIC will capitalize on the synergy already created by the “Education, Outreach and Training Partnership for Advanced Computational Infrastructure” (EOT-PACI) -- a partnership of dozens of institutions and organizations throughout the nation, led by the National Computational Science Alliance and the National Partnership for Advanced Computational Infrastructure. During the course of its tenure, an external evaluation showed that 50,000 people had benefited from EOT-PACI. "The strength and beauty of EPIC is the diversity and commitment of its partners," said Roscoe Giles, Boston University, who is the co-principle investigator for EPIC, along with Greg Moses of the University of Wisconsin, Madison. EPIC will engage K-12 educators, researchers, humanists, evaluators, leaders of non-profit organizations, students and individuals from underrepresented groups in the development of cyberinfrastructure. Stephenie McLean, EOT Coordinator for TACC and member of the EPIC Advancement Team said, "EPIC provides an incredible opportunity for the inclusion of diverse emerging cyberinfrastructure communities. TACC is committed to identifying and working with minority serving institutions so they can benefit from the comprehensive classes introduced through EPIC."