Bob Borchers, NSF division director of the division of advanced scientific computing, and Kris Stewart, SDSC computational curriculum coordinator, will participate on a panel at the Seminars on Academic Computing '95 conference to be held August 4-9 in Snowmass Village, Colorado. The conference, entitled "Tough Choices/Radical Opportunities," is the 26th in a series of conferences organized by the Seminars on Academic Computing and brings together a group of administrators of academic computing in higher education to discuss, debate, and exhange ideas on issues of common concern in academic computing and information technology. Borchers and Stewart will present "High Performance Computing and Communications in Research and Education" at the Directors' Seminar on August 8 at 10:30 am. Priscilla Jane Huston of the NSF and Rice University will be moderator. Stewart's part of the presentation, in abstract form below, focuses on the educational aspects of high-performance computing.
"High Performance Computing and Communications in Research and Education" - Abstract
Kris Stewart
Associate Professor/Computer Science
Dept. of Mathematical Sciences
San Diego State University
Senior Fellow, SDSC
By providing access to HPCC technology and applications, we can inspire students to pursue challenging degree programs in computational science. Students who gain experience using these advanced technologies are better prepared to work in "high-technology" industries once they graduate. In developing HPCC curricula, university faculty must obtain training in this rapidly evolving field and design the course content accordingly. Training resources for faculty, such as workshops and computer time, are provided by the NSF supercomputer centers. Wide World Web sites (for example, http://www.sdsc.edu/) are used to distribute HPCC information. To allow access to these web sites, a university must have a network with reasonable bandwidth and adequate graphical computer displays. Such local facilities, which must be available for convenient use by both faculty and students, help distribute the cost of HPCC education among the supercomputer centers and the associated academic institutions. Education programs at San Diego State University have benefited tremendously from X-term computer laboratories on campus, a T1 network link to the Internet, and proximity to the San Diego Supercomputer Center - which is approximately 20 miles away. The proximity issue is less important now due to increased network access to extensive SDSC documentation via the World Wide Web.
As HPCC technologies approach petabyte storage capacities and teraflops computing rates, new horizons are arising for multidisciplinary approaches to solving problems. Another resource for faculty is the Undergraduate Computational Engineering and Sciences (UCES) program, sponsored by the Department of Energy. This program enables a voluntary, cooperative group of faculty to develop and share HPCC curricula. See
These and other academic resources available on the Internet will be presented.