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. It will be an integral part of the Blue Waters project with intense involvement from partners in the Great Lakes Consortium for Petascale Computation.

Undergraduate Education

Through a systematic effort of curriculum development, faculty workshops, and student internships, undergraduate students in all fields of science and engineering will be exposed to the opportunities offered by petascale computing. The Undergraduate Education Program will focus on:

• Curriculum development to expose students to computational modeling and simulation through learning modules designed to enhance existing undergraduate courses.
• Faculty development workshops to create a cadre of educators with the knowledge and expertise to teach students about petascale computing.
• Undergraduate internships to afford students the opportunity to work directly in a number of areas of the Blue Waters project.

For more information on undergraduate programs, contact Robert Panoff.

Graduate Education

The Virtual School of Computational Science and Engineering is the graduate education component of the Blue Waters project. The Virtual School brings together faculty at the universities in the Big Ten plus the University of Chicago, Iowa State University, Louisiana State University, and the University of North Carolina. The Virtual School will focus on:

• Curriculum development to enhance existing courses and create new curricula and courses in computational science and engineering that draw upon the expertise of faculty across the institutions in the Great Lakes Consortium.
• Seminars and summer schools to introduce students to the issues involved in creating applications for petascale systems and using petascale computers to address challenging science and engineering problems.
• Certificate programs to establish "best practices" in computational science and engineering to reflect modern ideas of "core" knowledge in the field.

For more information on the Virtual School, contact Sharon Glotzer.

Applications and Training Program

The Applications and Training Program consists of a semi-annual series of workshop that provide scientists and engineers with the knowledge and expertise needed to develop applications for petascale computers. Topics covered in these workshops will include:

• Computer architecture (particularly Blue Waters)
• Compilers and libraries (e.g. MPI, FFT, matrix operations, etc.)
• Techniques for achieving high performance on tens to hundreds of thousands of cores
• Debugging, performance and validation tools
• I/O and archival storage functionality
• Data analysis and visualization
• Co-processor utilization for applications
• Application development environments (e.g., Eclipse)
• Application frameworks (e.g., CACTUS)