The university is creating a modern parallel computing laboratory and a course on computational science. The course introduces undergraduates to the use of a high-speed parallel computer for solving computationally intensive scientific problems and introduces computer science students to scientific applications of computing. This new system enables the university to introduce parallel computing into several other courses in the computer science curriculum, e.g., graphics, algorithms, programming languages, and operating systems. The project director is developing teaching materials, which will be disseminated to other colleges and universities. The laboratory consists of a 12-node distributed memory parallel computer with a workstation as a host machine. Each node includes a powerful compute processor and is combined with a T805 transputer as a communications processor. The computer is accessible from the university's network of workstations, for simultaneous use.
