This award is to support travel to Super Computing to participate in student challenge activities, hardware acquisition, curriculum development, and training support for the University of the Pacific all-female team to SC13. The LittleFe cluster computers requested as part of this proposal are widely known and used in the HPC education community, thanks to an active outreach effort at past SC conferences and other venues. Curriculum developed at Pacific for the LittleFe clusters can be easily used by other institutions, greatly facilitating the spread of new educational innovations. The travel support requested for the all-female student team will enable future participation in the student cluster competition. This activity enables teaching of key HPC skills (such as cluster architecture, system administrative, and scientific computing) in a competitive learning environment.
High-performance computing (HPC) plays a key role in Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM) fields today. Preparing a diverse student body to be successful in this environment is an important mission of the University of the Pacific (Pacific). This NSF project deepened the role of High-performance computing at Pacific in two ways. First, by developing expanded hands-on curriculum in the Computer Engineering, Computer Science, and Physics departments, and second, by supporting the participation of an all-female team of Pacific undergraduates in the 2013 Student Cluster Competition. At the University of the Pacific, we are preparing our students to be successful in the HPC community through a variety of curricular and extra-curricular activities. Six LittleFe portable cluster computers, purchased under this project, have allowed faculty in the Computer Science and Computer Engineering departments to expand hands-on projects in existing undergraduate courses such as Parallel Computing and Operating Systems. Having portable, dedicated clusters available as an on-campus resource has allowed students more freedom to practice skills such as cluster setup, system configuration, scalable algorithm development, and performance evaluation/optimization. In the Physics department, the LittleFe clusters support a concentration in Computational Physics, and are used to build skills in parallel computing in an introductory Scientific Computing Seminar, and application development in upper division Computational Physics courses. The LittleFe clusters are an ideal platform to segue from PC and workstations to the larger research clusters and national facilities. The newest addition to the HPC program at Pacific is an extra-curricular student competition team, jointly mentored by Pacific faculty and staff from the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. This team has participated twice in the Student Cluster Competition at SC12 & SC13, the International Conference for High Performance Computing, Networking, Storage, and Analysis. The competition is a real-time, 48-hour challenge to design and assemble a state-of-the-art cluster computer on the exhibit floor and use it to run scientific applications, competing to achieve the greatest performance on a limited power budget. Pacific’s all-female team – named Team Venus – consists of undergraduate students majoring in a variety of STEM fields, including computer engineering, computer science, electrical engineering, engineering physics, applied mathematics, and physics. Team travel expenses (airfare, ground transportation, and lodging) to the SC13 conference & competition (November 2013 in Denver, CO) were directly supported from this grant. This capstone experience has generated significant interest in the HPC field from students in a variety of STEM disciplines. This interest is being leveraged through recruiting and outreach efforts at the university and K-12 levels to establish a pipeline of students from previously un-engaged communities in HPC and STEM fields, thus facilitating the development of this future workforce.
