This project will encourage the use of the cyberinfrastructure by a wide range of faculty and students, make contributions to improve middleware and grid computing applications so that they can be used by that wider audience, enhance the curricular choices for undergraduate students, and promote the development of a workforce of both minority and traditional students to serve the increasing needs of US business, industry, and education.
Working with the Ohio Board of Regents and the faculty at eight Ohio colleges and universities, the Principal Investigators from the Ohio Supercomputer Center, Capital University, and the Ohio Learning Network will infuse cyberinfrastructure into a broader spectrum of institutions through an inter-institutional computational science undergraduate education and research program. Specifically this project will: 1) integrate the cyberinfrastructure (i.e., middleware, high performance computing, networking, mass storage and visualization tools and resources) into the computational science curriculum; 2) develop sharable educational materials (modules) deploying existing cyberinfrastructure; 3) develop a set of guidelines for a model computational science undergraduate program; 4) develop guidelines for inter-institutional cooperation (i.e., tuition sharing, awarding credits etc); 5) increase the diversity of students in computational science education.
The outcomes will also include curriculum guidelines and inter-institutional agreements to propagate the computational science discipline at community colleges, undergraduate liberal arts and comprehensive colleges, minority serving institutions, and Research I universities. This project will provide educational benefits to a diverse group of students from a variety of backgrounds and will incorporate a serious evaluation and assessment component to help understand how to scale this activity widely beyond Ohio and into further educational areas in the in the K-20 educational pipeline. The project will also incorporate external industrial advisors to assure relevance of the curriculum and education training for the modern workforce.
