What a cool morning!  I am so appreciative of the opportunity to attend the Pittsburgh Supercomputing Institute‘s Discover ’09 open house this morning.  My school’s tech director was unable to attend, and asked me if I was interested in going to check out some of the programs that they are developing and implementing in collaboration with educational institutions all over the country.  The focus of the open house was on five main areas.

• High Powered Computing (HPC) in modern business (engineering, manufacturing, etc)
• Biomedical Supercomputing
• HPC & the green economy
• Supercomputing hardware
• Outreach to educational institutions (K-12 and universities)

Obviously the last area of focus was most pertinent.  The PSC has several outreach programs, in which it “promotes the understanding of supercomputing and its application in today’s leading-edge scientific research.”  I spoke to several of the PSC representatives and got an overview of all of the programs, in which they work with schools & teachers to support teaching and learning in the areas of computer science as well as other science areas.

I particularly enjoyed learning about the program for introducing Parallel Computing to High School Students.  In fact, it was particularly interesting since our school’s Computer Science teacher (Todd Ollendyke) is one of the first to pilot the program as part of his Computer Science curriculum.  The impetus behind the program came from recognizing that many CS students were entering university level courses with a weakness in understanding the applications of High Powered Computing and parallel programming.

The program is unique in that it is a blend of some basic unix/linux skills (which our students lack) and the C programming language.  The first part of the project uses a Sudoko puzzle game, which students first program a serial ‘brute force’ solution to & then apply the lessons in parallel programming using the powerful resources of the PSC cloud cluster and the High Performance XT3 named BigBen.  After the relatively simple experience programming the puzzle solution, students will experience more practical applications, and see some of the real-life power behind these HPC resources.

What’s more, the PSC outreach is not limited simply to the High School Computer Science courses.  The jumpstart program using STAKEs to support STEM is perhaps a mildly confusing name for an educational program (and resources available on the linked page) for teaching about technology applications in science to a broader & younger audience (grades 8+).  As the emphasis is that HPC has a real place in the world (from the Pringles factory to natural gas turbines) it seems appropriate that the programs appeal to a scientifically-minded audience to show the importance of computing technology in an ever-increasing number of fields.

note:
[Science and Technology Active Knowledge Experiences] – [Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics]

The second major outreach stems from one of the primary focuses of the PSC, the biomedical research and modeling made possible by HPC.  The PSC supports three programs under the heading Computational Thinking and Tools in the Science Classroom.  These three programs are all designed to directly support the introduction of computation into the high school science classrooms, connecting math & the sciences in an interdisciplinary manner.  CAST (Computation and Science for Teachers) offers training to science and math teachers to use modeling and simulation in the classroom.  CMIST (Computational Models in Science Teaching) is a program that distributes digital models of various biological functions.  The models are currently available on DVD, but will soon be offered via the CMIST Website.

Aside from the directly educational connections that exist at the PSC, I also got a chance to take a virtual tour of their computing center (to say nothing of the overview of their astounding dedicated network) using a wifi enabled robot to scoot around the computing room.  Their center is in a warehouse in Monroeville, PA.  What a datacenter! The tour included a look at the CRAY XT3 “BigBen”, rows of Altix 4700 machines, Pope & Salk (over 4,000 processors w/ a gig of memory on each.) And much more . . . al of this power is leveraged by various partners, like the National Institute of Health, National Science Foundation and other ‘open scienteific research’

Finally, we took a look at one of the new nodes (knocks?) on the National Lambda Rail, part of an effort to bring distant scientists together using state-of-the-art ($40,000) CISCO teleconferencing units.

This entry was posted on Thursday, January 29th, 2009 at 1:45 pm and is filed under conference, reflection. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.