is an NPACI activity focused on undergraduate education and outreach. NPACI (National Partnership for Advanced Computational Infrastructure, www.npaci.edu) is one of two NSF-funded partnesrhips of universities and national laboratories, with the mandate to create and maintain national supercomputing environment.The Ed Center opened on SDSU campus October 10, 1997. It has three staff members: Kris Stewart, Director; Ilya Zaslavsky, GIS Staff Scientist; and Dolores Candelario, Assiatant to the Director. At this time, we aslo employ 5 student assistants.
The mission of the Ed Center is to support the incorporation of high-performance computing tools and methodologies, developed by NPACI partners in particular, into undergraduate curricula in SDSU and CSU, as the largest and most diverse undergraduate system in the nation. We have focused on such tools as VRML, Java applications, digital libraries, web-based collaborative environments, protein data banks, etc. Disseminating information about NPACI technologies, establishing contacts between SDSU and CSU faculty, on one side, and NPACI researchers, on the other side, and collaborating individually with faculty on selected research and curriculum development projects have been some of the main directions of our work.
is one of four Application Thrust Areas of NPACI. NPACI partners focus on earth systems modeling and orchestrating multiscale models across distributed computers; ecological and environmental modeling that incorporates remote-sensing data; and an Earth systems digital library that will create new opportunities for scientists, educators, students, and policy makers.Some examples of past and current projects of SDSC and NPACI:
San Diego Bay Project (http://www.sdsc.edu/SDBAY/):
A collction of databases, resources, models, software, and literature, related to San Diego Bay, water quality issues in particular. The databases are searchable, some models can be run on-line, their results are visualized on maps and in VRML. More information and links related to the project are accessible from the National Center for Ecological Analysis and Synthesis page at SDSC.Biodiversity Insight System (BIS) (http://biodi.sdsc.edu/)This system for analysis and visualisation (and mapping) of biodiversity data is being developed by the University of Kansas and the San Diego Supercomputer CenterComputational Ecology Workshop documents (http://www.sdsc.edu/compeco_workshop/report/helly_publication.html)The report summarizes the results of the workshop conducted at SDSU, focused on data management, visualization, and modeling issues in modern comutational ecology.EarthRise (http://earthrise.sdsc.edu/)This is an online collection of over 100,000 of photographic images of different parts of the Earth taken by astronauts during the Space Shuttle flights in the last 15 years.Ecological Society oif America page at SDSC (http://esa.sdsc.edu/)This non-partisan, nonprofit organization was founded in 1915 and unites 7,600 members who conduct research, teach, and work to provide the ecological knowledge needed to solve environmental problems. ESA's data repository includes links to ecology-related applications, monographs, and searchable databases.Alexandria Digital Library (http://alexandria.sdc.ucsb.edu/)A distributed digital library for geographically-referenced information, being developed at UC Santa Barbara and mirrored at SDSC.