The Daily Aztec

Monday, April 21, 1997

San Diego supercomputer will connect schools

By MELISSA EVANS
Daily Aztec Staff Writer

In less than a year, San Diego State University will be linked to 36 other academic and research institutions.

As part of the National Partnerships for Advanced Computational Infrastructure, SDSU will be the site of an Education Center for Computational Science & Engineering using the resources of the San Diego Supercomputer Center, located at the University of California San Diego.

Out of four similar national computer programs, the National Science Board would only fund two. Last month the board announced that the San Diego supercomputer system would be one. The other was a team of institutional partnerships led by the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champion.

Instructors at SDSU already use this supercomputer system for current information in their discipline. However, when the EC/CSE is funded on Oct. 1, 1997, SDSU will be linked to 36 other academic institutions.

This will bring high performance computing to undergraduate curriculum development at SDSU, the California State University system and the partner institutions, said Kris Stewart, associate professor of mathematical and computer sciences at SDSU.

"This partnership will be massive," said Stewart, who has been appointed director of the EC/CSE. "(SDSU) will be a conduit and catalyst for facilitating the incorporation of the technologies developed through NPACI into undergraduate education."

Instructors in the geography, physics, math and science, and engineering departments already use information generated by this supercomputer.

Soon instructors in all departments, including art and history, will be able to incorporate the latest information into their curriculum, Stewart said.

Stewart will facilitate workshops and coordinate curriculum with faculty members when they want to use the information.

"Undergraduates will be able to make enormous use of this system," she said.

With an enrollment of nearly 30,000 students at SDSU and approximately 273,000 undergraduates in the CSU system, any developments will have a significant impact on the future work force, teachers and researchers nationwide, she said.

The EC/CSE will introduce NPACI to other CSU faculty and help them to adapt their own curricula through an outreach program. SDSU graduates will work with other CSU schools one on one to assist in this process.

EC/CSE activities also will include faculty seminars and summer workshops for all partnership members focusing on NPACI resources as tools for scientific investigations, discovery and problem solving.

The emphasis will be on undergraduate curriculum development with a special effort to include the social sciences, humanities and business disciplines as well as science and engineering, Stewart said.

The EC/CSE will also reach out to high schools where Stewart coordinated the Supercomputer Teacher Enhancement Program for three years.

This program, which targets high school math and science teachers, is designed to incorporate computational science technologies into their curricula.