High Performance Computing Education Efforts at the University of Tennessee

Shirley Browne

Presented at the 1997 CRPC Annual Meeting Poster Session

UTK has been awarded a National Science Foundation grant to establish a MetaCenter Regional Alliance (MRA) for Computational Science Collaborations with Historically Black Colleges and Universities. MRAs are extensions of the National Science Foundations's National MetaCenter for Computational Science and Engineering. The UTK MRA program is focusing on establishing collaborations between computational research scientists at historically black colleges and universities (HBCUs) and other interdisciplinary researchers affiliated with the MetaCenter and the UTK MRA. Four HBCUs are participating in the program: Alabama A&M University, Meharry Medical College, Southern University and A&M College, and Tennessee State University. The UTK MRA is also working with HBCU faculty to develop and integrate high-performance computing applications into graduate- and undergraduate-level courses and to assist HBCU teaching faculty in gaining access to the high-performance computing resources of the MetaCenter and the UTK MRA.

UTK is involved through CRPC with the Department of Defense High Performance Computing Modernization Program. As part of the Programming Environment and Training (PET) component of the program, UTK has developed courses in scalable math libraries, message-passing programming interfaces, and parallel debugging and performance tuning tools. These courses are taught on-site at the Major Shared Resource Centers (MSRCs) and are also broadcast via M-Bone and recorded for later viewing. The courses consist of lecture, demonstrations, and hand-on exercises. UTK is also making the course materials available on the Web for self-paced instruction.