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PARALLEL COMPUTING WORKSHOPS AT ARGONNE BENEFIT A BROAD BASE OF STUDENTS THROUGH UNDERGRADUATE FACULTY
As the use of parallel computers has increased in science and
engineering, the need for undergraduate courses training students in
the use of these tools has increased. Unfortunately, by the late 1980s,
few faculty at the nation's college and universities had received the
training necessary to develop adequate curricula in parallel computing
because the software tools for first-generation machines were not yet
available. The problem had become particularly acute in the nation's
Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs) and minority
institutions.
To stimulate the creation of parallel computing curricula at HBCUs and
minority institutions, Argonne National Laboratory has hosted parallel
computing workshops since 1992 for faculty from colleges and
universities with significant enrollments of female and underrepresented
minority students. The workshops introduce faculty to parallel machines
and programming in a one-week workshop at Argonne; during the remainder
of the semester, participants are given access to these machines through
an Internet connection, during which time they work on examples and
experiment with real applications. The knowledge the faculty gain from
these workshops can then be used to prepare courses to train
undergraduates in the use of parallel computing.
Participants in a recent parallel computing workshop at Argonne
National laboratory. Since 1992, Argonne has offered courses for
faculty from coleges and universities with significant enrollments of
female and minority students.
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The workshops have kept participants up to date with developing trends
in the parallel computing industry. For instance, by mid-1992, the
performance of shared-memory multiprocessors was surpassed by
distributed-memory multicomputers, which had an increased potential for
scalability and a predicted teraflop performance by 1995. In response
to this situation, CRPC researchers at Argonne converted the workshops
from a focus on a single computer architecture to a focus on program
portability and architecture independence. A portable programming tool
p4, developed at Argonne, was used to supplement this curricular shift.
The p4 tool enables users to perform message passing on a network of
workstations and distributed-memory multicomputers and to simulate
message passing on a shared-memory multiprocessor. Participants,
beginning with those in the August 1992 workshop, have written
distributed-memory versions of computer assignments using p4.
Argonne has also offered graduate-level classes that introduced some of
the material in the faculty workshops at a more accelerated rate. These
week-long classes have focused on program portability across diverse
architectures, including the Sequent Symmetry S81 and BBN Butterfly
TC2000 machines.
Overall, the workshops have had a significant effect on the teaching of
parallel computing at the undergraduate level. Faculty from more than
54 HBCUs have participated in the program since 1992. In turn, these
faculty have offered approximately 20 courses each year, with total
enrollments of 300 undergraduates a semester. Within three years, the
program hopes to be reaching 1,000 new students each semester. The
fifth week-long faculty workshop was held in January 1994 and a two-day
workshop for local community college faculty on parallel methods and
tools will be held in March 1994.
For more information on this program, contact Gail Pieper, Argonne
National Laboratory, Mathematics and Computer Science Division, 9700 S.
Cass Avenue, Argonne, IL 60439, 708-252-7222, 708-252-5986 (fax), pieper@mcs.anl.gov .
Source: "Bringing Parallel Computation to the College and University
Classroom," Robert Sompolski, John Mateja, and Ewing Lusk, Argonne
National Laboratory
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