Date: Fri, 28 Mar 1997 15:16:34 -0800 (PST) To: stewart@saturn.sdsu.edu From: Louise Snider Subject: news release March 28, 1997 Contact: Louise Snider, 619/594-5204 San Diego State will take lead in bringing high performance computing into undergraduate education San Diego State University will become the site of an Education Center for Computational Science & Engineering (EC/CSE) as part of a national partnership linking the University with 36 other academic and research institutions participating in the National Partnerships for Advanced Computational Infrastructure (NPACI). Approval for NPACI was announced today by the National Science Board along with approval for another team of institutional partnerships led by the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. Using the resources of the San Diego Supercomputer Center (SDSC) located at the NPACI lead institution, the University of California, San Diego, the partners will collaborate to develop a metacomputing environment capable of tackling some of the most complex scientific and engineering problems as well as supporting efforts to bring the full potential of supercomputing to the educational community. Kris Stewart, associate professor of mathematical and computer sciences at SDSU and computational science curriculum coordinator for the SDSC, has been appointed director of the EC/CSE. She will direct efforts to bring high performance computing into undergraduate curriculum development at SDSU, the California State University system, and the partner institutions. "San Diego State," says Dr. Stewart, "will be a conduit and catalyst for facilitating the incorporation of the technologies developed through NPACI into undergraduate education. Our role as the Education Center for Computational Science and Engineering has received strong support and matching funds from the CSU and San Diego State." With a diverse enrollment of nearly 30,000 students at SDSU and approximately 273,000 undergraduate students in the CSU, any developments in undergraduate education will have a significant impact on the future workforce, teachers and researchers of California and the nation. Through an outreach program, the Education Center will introduce NPACI to CSU faculty and help them to adapt their own curricula with the assistance of SDSU graduate students working with them one-on-one. The 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 made to engage the social sciences, humanities, and business disciplines, as well as science and engineering. Additionally, the Education Center's activities 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 help them incorporate computational science technologies into their curricula. For further information about the Education Center for Computational Science & Engineering at SDSU, contact Dr. Kris Stewart at phone: 619/942-1012, email: stewart@cs.sdsu.edu, or web site: www.stewart.cs.sdsu.edu. (end)