Engineering - Other (59) Our project addresses issues in undergraduate education at research universities highlighted in the 1998 Boyer Commission Report. Our aim is to incorporate advances in information technology into the curriculum, and is consistent with recent increased emphasis in the applied areas of information technology by the National Science Foundation. This has been accomplished by developing an option to the department's undergraduate Mechanical Engineering degree in the area of Computational Engineering. We have worked with faculty from the Engineering Research Center at Mississippi State University to adapt the curricula from their undergraduate minor in Computational Engineering to our Utah State University program. We have also built a PC Beowulf cluster consisting of 5 server and 20 compute nodes to support the Computational Engineering option. This will be accomplished by adopting a cluster design process developed at the University of Kentucky. Undergraduate students are being exposed to cluster designs and programming models through a week long seminar, which will be offered on a yearly basis. Results of our efforts will be disseminated through the national ASEE conference and through publication in an engineering education journal. In addition, materials from the cluster workshop will be made available through our Department's website.
