NCSI: Call For Participation

Call for Participation in the Blue Waters Undergraduate Petascale Education Program

Preparation for petascale computing requires solid grounding in Computational Science and Engineering (CSE), HPC and HPC-related curricula. As a community, we must address the engagement of a larger and more diverse workforce to broaden participation and to ensure that CSE education keeps pace with the evolution of science and technology. We will leverage faculty expertise to establish best practices, identify and fill gaps, and modernize the CSE curriculum across all science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) fields.

The NCSA Blue Waters petascale computing facility funded by NSF will support this effort by providing 1% of the computing capacity of its computational infrastructure in direct support of educational applications. The Blue Waters system will support sustained petaflop performance of scientific codes, and thereby provide a unique educational learning experience for students across the nation.

Rationale and Audience

The Blue Waters undergraduate education emphasis is intended to prepare the next generation of graduate students, the next generation of K-12 teachers, and an educated workforce. All undergraduate institutions are encouraged to participate including 2- and 4-year colleges and universities, minority serving institutions, EPSCoR institutions, women's colleges, and institutions addressing special needs students.

Undergraduate Education Programs

To achieve these goals, the Blue Waters Undergraduate Petascale Education Program (UPEP) is launching three programs for engaging the national community. The three programs are:

Professional Development Workshops for undergraduate faculty
Research Experiences for undergraduates
Undergraduate Materials Development by undergraduate faculty

Call for Undergraduate Materials Development

The goal of the materials development effort is to support undergraduate faculty in preparing a diverse community of students for petascale computing. This program seeks compelling examples in STEM fields, from desktop to petascale incorporating that address:

Quantitative reasoning
Computational thinking
Multi-scale modeling

The materials development effort will be conducted in partnership with Computational Science Education Reference Desk (CSERD), a Pathways portal of National Science Digital Library (NSDL), and HPC University, to broadly disseminate the materials through these digital libraries. All materials will be subject to a formal VVA review before being published. The VVA review process includes:

Validation: is the right problem solved?
Verification: is the problem solved right?
Accreditation: is the problem aimed at the right education level?

Blue Waters will support the annual development of modules targeted for all STEM fields over each of the next three years. It is expected that the development cycle for each module will span about 18 months. The development process must include the development of materials for a module, field testing of the materials in an undergraduate classroom, conducting a VVA review of the materials, and then publishing the materials through the CSERD and HPC University digital libraries. The Blue Waters team will provide support to the faculty throughout the development process. In addition, access to petascale class computing systems will be made available to the faculty and the classes in which the materials are field-tested. Faculty are asked to submit a proposal outlining their plans. The faculty selected to participate will receive a stipend of about $5,000 upon completion of the development process.

The materials that are developed must be based on the UCES, Keck/NSF model that includes:

Scientific question
Computational model(s)
Algorithm(s)
Software implementation(s)
Example problem(s)
Rubric for assessment
References

UPEP Internship Participation

The Undergraduate Petascale Research Internship program enables and enhances undergraduate internship experiences in high-performance computational science and engineering. The program has been structured such that students that have identified faculty with research projects they would like to work on, or faculty looking for undergraduate students to work on a project, can apply to the program. During the review and selection process, promising students are matched with research projects (often at their home institution with a faculty member they have identified to work with, but not necessarily).

The UPEP internship program provides for a student stipend to enable faculty with high-quality undergraduate projects in high-performance computing to consider mentoring a student. The program also provides enhancements including a two-week intensive workshop on high-performance computing architectures, approaches and applications, and support to attend and present at the Supercomputing conference.

You can view the flyer for the 2010 internship program at:

Undergraduate Petascale Internship Poster
Undergraduate Petascale Internship Flyer

The 2010 Blue Waters Undergraduate Petascale Interns have already been selected. The internship application and project description process will be re-opened January 1, 2011.