2012 Workshops

Computation has become essential to the practice of contemporary biology. The storage, access, analysis and visualization of growing amounts of data, and the functional interpretation of complex biological phenomena require the use of a range of computational approaches and tools. This series of workshops aims to provide an introductory overview of computational resources and methods that can be used with students interested in biology or the biological applications of math.

This workshop will cover various ways that computers can be used to enhance and expand the educational experience of students enrolled in the undergraduate chemistry curriculum. Discussions and hands-on laboratory exercises on visualization, simulation, molecular modeling, and mathematical software will be presented.

This workshop aims to expose participants to and inspire them with new techniques, teaching materials, and applications to use computational models in the undergraduate curriculum. By bringing faculty and teachers from different disciplines together so that they can learn how to incorporate computational models into their classrooms and research projects, it will advance the use of computing in undergraduate science education. We desire to have participants from a broad range of disciplines, including computer science, mathematics, and the physical and life sciences.

NCSI's Parallel and Cluster Computing workshops focus on teaching faculty how to move from traditional desktop computing to modern high-performance hardware. Offerings range from end-user focused applications ready-designed for HPC to the details of creating applications designed to run on clusters, many-core machines, shared-memory machines, and graphics processing units. The material is designed for undergraduate faculty from a variety of disciplines who would like to add parallel computing to their undergraduate teaching and research. In addition, undergraduate and graduate students are encouraged to attend alongside a sponsoring faculty member. The workshop is hands-on, with exercises in both computing and curriculum development.

NCSI's Kinder, Gentler Supercomputing workshops focus on teaching faculty skills and applications in supercomputing that cut across all disciplines, in particular visualization and computer science skills required for domain scientists to bring high performance computing into their lab and classroom. The workshop will cover visualization tools used for gridded and non-gridded data as well as biological and chemical structures, and users will get hands on experience using ParaView and VMD, as well as data analysis with R. Additionally, we will focus on computer skills required to run existing HPC applications on clusters, in particular configuring, compiling, and installing open source packages as well as the use of queueing systems to submit and manage HPC jobs on multi-user systems.Undergraduate and graduate students are encouraged to attend alongside a sponsoring faculty member.

LittleFe is a portable mini-cluster which is small enough to fit in a shipping case, light enough to easily move between classrooms, and travels as standard checked baggage to conferences and workshops. LittleFe's primary focus is turnkey classroom demonstrations of, and exercises in, High Performance Computing (HPC), parallel programming, and Computational/Data Enabled Science and Engineering (CDESE). LittleFe supports shared memory, distributed memory, and GPGPU parallelism. LittleFe's secondary focus is as a production HPC resource for small institutions that are not yet able to afford or support a full scale cluster; in fact, LittleFe can be used as a gateway to, and development platform for full scale HPC resources.

LittleFe buildout events consist of participants assembling their LittleFe unit from a kit; installing the Bootable Cluster CD (BCCD) software on it; learning about the curriculum modules available for teaching parallel programming, HPC and CDESE; and learning how to develop new curriculum modules for the LittleFe/BCCD platform.

Shodor, in partnership with the National Computational Science Institute (NCSI), coupled with funding from the National Science Foundation, is offering an international training opportunity for pre-service and in-service teachers. Applicants must be participants in the Robert Noyce Teacher Scholarship Program or Fellowship program depending on the offering.

These workshops will be updated as new opportunities are organized, so please check frequently.

This workshop aims to expose participants to and inspire them with new techniques, teaching materials, and applications to use computational models in the undergraduate curriculum. By bringing faculty and teachers from different disciplines together so that they can learn how to incorporate computational models into their classrooms and research projects, it will advance the use of computing in undergraduate science education. We desire to have participants from a broad range of disciplines, including computer science, mathematics, and the physical and life sciences.