ACM TechNews
Infusing Petascale Thinking
NCSA (National Center for Supercomputing Applications) (07/08/08) Jewett, Barbara
The development of a petascale computer promises to revolutionize
education, which is the goal of the Great Lakes Consortium for Petascale
Computation (GLCPC), of which the nonprofit Shodor research and education
organization is a member. "The consortium education plan focuses on the
substantial transformation of the undergraduate experience to include not
only computational thinking but the computational thinking that leads to
the ability to work with petascale technologies," says Shodor executive
director Bob Panoff. He notes that the improvement of pre-college and
graduate education requires investment in undergraduate education, and
GLCPC's Blue Waters petascale computing project will concentrate on
alliances with the National Science Digital Library's Computational Science
Education Reference Desk, TeraGrid, and the National Computational Science
Institute. Panoff says the development of effective computational modules
designed to serve as a platform for multiscale modeling and petascale
computing will be facilitated through these partnerships. Another Blue
Waters component is the Virtual School for Computational Science and
Engineering co-founded by University of Michigan professor Sharon Glotzer
and University of Illinois National Center for Supercomputing Applications
director Thom Dunning as a site where students can learn about petascale
computing for science and engineering. "Many aspects of the nuts and bolts
of computational science ... fall between the cracks, and as a result, it
is not easy for today's students to learn all they need to know to become
tomorrow's innovators in high-performance scientific computing," observes
Glotzer. She says the mission of the virtual school is to fill in the gaps
in students' knowledge, particularly in petascale computing. "For many of
our most important scientific applications, petascale computing will force
us to rethink how we structure our codes to take full advantage of the
architecture of these new machines," Glotzer says.
http://www.ncsa.uiuc.edu/News/Stories/Infusingpetascale/
© Copyright 2008 Information, Inc. This service may be reproduced for internal distribution.