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
which is approximately twenty miles away. The proximity issue is less important now due to increased network access to extensive SDSC documentation via the World Wide Web.
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 http://uces.ameslab.gov/uces/ as well as the High Performance Scientific Computing (HPSC) project at the Univeristy of Colorado, Boulder, http://www.cs.colorado.edu/ftp/pub/HPSC/README.html, where a year-long undergraduate course has been fully developed, lecture notes and software available via the Internet, and soon to have a text published by MIT press.
As HPCC technologies approach petabyte storage
capacities and teraflops computing rates, new horizons are
arising for multidisciplinary approaches to solving problems.