SCIENCE

Teaching High Performance Computing to Undergraduate Faculty and Undergraduate Students Wins Best Paper in EOC Track at TeraGrid Conference

TeraGrid combines high performance computers, data resources and tools, and high-end research facilities around the country to produce an integrated high performance computing infrastructure. TeraGrid is the largest cyberinfrastructure for open scientific research.

In addition to attending the conference, Andrew Fitz Gibbon co-authored the paper Teaching High Performance Computing to Undergraduate Faculty and Undergraduate Students, which was awarded Best Paper in the Education, Outreach, and Training category at the conference. This paper highlights the importance of supercomputing in today’s technology world and also discusses the ways in which supercomputing is being used to further education.

As the paper states, “The Petascale era is happening right now. The top 3 Supercomputers as of June 2010 can achieve a maximum performance of over one Petaflop (1015 floating point operations per second) FLOPS. Within the next 10 years, high-end computing will reach the Exascale, or 1018 FLOPS.  The only way we'll get there is through extremely parallel systems such as the recent push towards using graphic chips for scientific codes. This is great news for those scientists already poised to take advantage of this power, but poses a challenge for students entering the High Performance Computing (HPC) field as well as the educators teaching those students.”

The paper goes on to explain that instruction on this subject happens through workshops offered by the National Computational Science Institute to help undergraduate faculty and students, (both undergraduate and graduate with aspirations of becoming undergraduate faculty) gain the prequisite knowledge for teaching Computational Science. Each workshop is highly hands-on, giving educators experience writing and running code on production HPC systems.

“It is great to see the contributions of Shodor receive this well deserved recognition,” says Thom Dunning Director of the National Center for Supercomputing Applications at the University of Illinois.

Teaching High Performance Computing to Undergraduate Faculty and Undergraduate Students was co-authored by Andrew Fitz Gibbon, David Joiner, Henry Neeman, Charles Peck, Skylar Thompson, Paul Gray, Tom Murphy, and R.M. Panoff.