There is a significant and growing concern that current and future computing professionals, as they enter the workforce upon graduation, are under-prepared for careers in the development and maintenance of software applications that support web-scale data intensive computing. Large scale cluster computing is a response to the increasing demands for high availability, fault tolerant, decentralized, and very large data retrieval needs in our country. Given the engineering and other constraints involved, optimal utilization of such resources will always be a concern for computing graduates, and thus for the colleges and universities that prepare them. This field requires expertise in a cross-section of engineering and computing disciplines.
This 2.5 day workshop in large-scale cluster computing provides material and curricular support for undergraduate teaching institutions. This initial workshop, to be conducted July 16-18, 2008, will invite professors in computer science and software engineering to a workshop at the University of Washington, where such a course has previously been conducted successfully. The goal is to encourage other institutions to adopt some or all of the curricular materials and initiatives into their courses, thus preparing a greater number of computing graduates for careers in web-scale data intensive computing.
The explicit goal of this workshop is to reach a large and diverse of group of computing professors, and in turn their students, to increase the likelihood that university graduates are able to step into their careers in such fields as grid and cloud computing and be able to contribute as quickly and effectively as possible now and throughout their careers. We expect this workshop to inform future similar events to further increase the impacts.
