Call For Participation

Call for Participation
National Computational Science Institute (NCSI)
Undergraduate Petascale Education Program

The NCSA Blue Waters project, in collaboration with the National Computational Science Institute (NCSI) and national HPC programs, is launching a coordinated effort to prepare current and future generations of students with the computational thinking skills, knowledge and commitment to advance scientific computing through the use of high performance computing (HPC) resources and environments.

Petascale computing is more complex than previous computing paradigms. New approaches for teaching and learning are required, and no single educational institution has the expertise and experience needed to fully exploit this extraordinary capability.

Preparation for petascale computing requires solid grounding in Computational Science and Engineering (CSE), HPC and HPC-related curricula. As a community, we must address the engagement of a larger and more diverse workforce to broaden participation and to ensure that CSE education keeps pace with the evolution of science and technology. We will leverage faculty expertise to establish best practices, identify and fill gaps, and modernize the CSE curriculum across all science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) fields.

The NCSA Blue Waters petascale computing facility funded by NSF will support this effort by providing 1% of the computing capacity of its computational infrastructure in direct support of educational applications. The Blue Waters system will support sustained petaflop performance of scientific codes, and thereby provide a unique educational learning experience for students across the nation.

Rationale and Audience

The Blue Waters undergraduate education emphasis is intended to prepare the next generation of graduate students, the next generation of K-12 teachers, and an educated workforce. All undergraduate institutions are encouraged to participate including 2- and 4-year colleges and universities, minority serving institutions, EPSCoR institutions, women’s colleges, and institutions addressing special needs students.

Undergraduate Education Programs

To achieve these goals, the Blue Waters Undergraduate Petascale Education Program (uPEP) is launching three programs for engaging the national community. The three programs are:

• Undergraduate Materials Development by undergraduate faculty
• Research Experiences for undergraduates
• Professional Development Workshops for undergraduate faculty

Call for Undergraduate Materials Development

The goal of the materials development effort is to support undergraduate faculty in preparing a diverse community of students for petascale computing. This program seeks compelling examples in STEM fields, from desktop to petascale incorporating that address:

• Quantitative reasoning
• Computational thinking
• Multi-scale modeling

The materials development effort will be conducted in partnership with Computational Science Education Reference Desk (CSERD), a Pathways portal of National Science Digital Library (NSDL), and HPC University, to broadly disseminate the materials through these digital libraries. All materials will be subject to a formal VVA review before being published. The VVA review process includes:

• Validation: is the right problem solved?
• Verification: is the problem solved right?
• Accreditation: is the problem aimed at the right education level?

Blue Waters will support the annual development of modules targeted for all STEM fields over each of the next three years. It is expected that the development cycle for each module will span about 18 months. The development process must include the development of materials for a module, field testing of the materials in an undergraduate classroom, conducting a VVA review of the materials, and then publishing the materials through the CSERD and HPC University digital libraries. The Blue Waters team will provide support to the faculty throughout the development process. In addition, access to petascale class computing systems will be made available to the faculty and the classes in which the materials are field-tested. Faculty are asked to submit a proposal outlining their plans. The faculty selected to participate will receive a stipend of about $5,000 upon completion of the development process.

The materials that are developed must be based on the UCES, Keck/NSF model that includes:

• Scientific question
• Computational model(s)
• Algorithm(s)
• Software implementation(s)
• Example problem(s)
• Rubric for assessment
• References

Call for Undergraduate Student Applications for Internships

To goal is to engage undergraduate students in petascale computing research and education projects. Students selected through an application process will be provided with a full-year internship that includes summer and academic year support totaling $5,000. The students will become members of a petascale research group. The students will work within a research or education team, and will be provided multiple opportunities to interact with all of the other students during their internships. The students will also be asked to attend an SC Education Program to report on their research experience.

Students must be enrolled in an undergraduate institution. Students at all undergraduate institutions, as described above, are encouraged to apply. Under-represented students are strongly encouraged to apply.

Call for Participation in Professional Development Workshops

The goal is to prepare faculty for petascale computing education and research. The participants will engage in incorporating computational thinking and petascale resources in their undergraduate classes. The participants will address teaching and learning opportunities to address quantitative reasoning, computational thinking, and multiscale modeling across all STEM fields. The workshops will: address the use of petascale approaches in upper division courses; emphasize modeling over programming; and develop competence and confidence to mentor undergraduate research and collaborate with research universities.

Blue Waters Undergraduate Education Application Process

The first step to participate in any or all of these activities is to create a NCSI user account at the NCSI web site: www.computationalscience.org. Information about opportunities to participate in these and other education programs will be sent to everyone with a NCSI account.

We look forward to talking with you about these opportunities, as well as exploring other opportunities for advancing computational thinking you would like to pursue in collaboration with the Blue Waters Education Team!

• Bob Panoff
• Scott Lathrop

For additional information, please see:

• NCSA Blue Waters – www.ncsa.uiuc.edu/BlueWaters
• NCSI – www.computationalscience.org
• CSERD – www.shodor.org/refdesk
• HPC University – www.hpcuniv.org
• TeraGrid – www.teragrid.org
• Shodor – www.shodor.org
• SC07-10 Education Programs – www.sc-education.org

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