CENTER FOR COMPUTATION & TECHNOLOGY

High-performance computing -- solving problems using clusters of interconnected supercomputers -- is having profound impacts on science, engineering and industry and is quickly becoming the leading technology of the 21st century. As businesses use supercomputing for applications like data warehousing, transaction processing and business intelligence, knowledge of supercomputing is becoming a critical advantage in today's workplace. However, many students who want to learn about high-performance computing do not have the opportunity to do so because their colleges and universities do not offer classes in the field. College-level courses on HPC are scarce both because the technology is just emerging and because there is not always a qualified professor to teach the course. A Louisiana State University computer science professor, Thomas Sterling, hopes to make instruction about HPC more readily available through his new course, “High-Performance Computing: Concepts, Methods and Means,” which makes use of Internet-based video technologies provided by the university's Center for Computation and Technology, or CCT. Sterling's course, the only one of its kind in the country, marks the first use of high-definition video broadcast via the Internet for distributed classroom instruction. As well as being offered at LSU, the course is being exported to schools internationally. “Every student should have a chance,” Sterling said, explaining the creation of his course. “It is unfair to me that students would be deprived of the opportunity to learn simply because their universities do not offer a course in a particular subject.” The idea for using this technology for the class grew out of a research project on the use of optical networks done in collaboration with colleagues Micro Electronics Center of North Carolina and Masaryk University in the Czech Republic. CCT Director Ed Seidel supports the course as a way to bring the technology of high-performance computing to more people who can go on to use that technology in the workplace. “It is amazing to see a research project lead to such an important application in practice in just a year,” Seidel said. “It is a good example of the immense payoff of research and the state's investments in the Louisiana Optical Network Initiative and other information technology programs for things we do in everyday life – in this case, education.” The technology component is made possible at LSU through the Louisiana Optical Network Initiative, or LONI, a high-speed, fiber optics network that links supercomputers at major research sites throughout Louisiana. LONI brings the state onto the National LambdaRail, a high-speed network that links research facilities around the country. Through such networks, the boundaries between universities can be blurred, and students at one institution can access educational instruction from another without transferring. “Louisiana will, in a very short time, be one of the most connected places in the country,” Sterling said. “Since the technology is in place, we can use it for classroom instruction to get more young people involved in this field.” Sterling, an internationally recognized supercomputing expert who was with NASA prior to joining CCT, has worked on numerous international computing projects. Sterling is also the father of Beowulf class clusters, developed with colleague Donald Becker, which today are a common building block of the world's supercomputers. “With this class, Louisiana and LSU are starting the process of moving out of the conventional classroom and are creating different approaches to academics,” Sterling said. For the “alpha run” of the course, which began on Jan. 16, it is being offered to students at Louisiana Tech University, the University of Arkansas, Micro Electronics Center of North Carolina and Masaryk University in the Czech Republic. Sterling explained that these sites were selected for the first run of the course because each has access to a high-speed network connection for ease in streaming the course, and also because there is a high-performance computing expert at each of those universities who can assist with the trial run as necessary. “As a small country, we could not afford the biggest supercomputers, but the knowledge of supercomputing technology gives our graduates, who often work abroad, a competitive advantage,” said Ludek Matyska from Masaryk University. “For a long time, we worked together with CCT in the area of high-definition video transmission over the high-speed network, so we decided to use our expertise in this field to promote supercomputing at Masaryk University, too. Using the new technology, students everywhere can take advantage of resources of other schools and are no longer limited to their home university's curriculum. On the other hand, each university can deepen its particular expertise without endangering the overall quality and broad coverage of its education.” Plans are already in the works to send the course to even more universities and research institutions in the Spring 2008 semester. Sterling has received interest from many more schools in the U.S. and worldwide to participate in the Spring 2008 semester course presentation. The course is designed to offer an interdisciplinary look at the high-performance computing field. Students should leave the class prepared to pursue professional goals like building supercomputers, developing new software for them or working in a business that could benefit from high-performance computing resources. Sterling is creating a DVD series of his lectures that will include subtitles for the hearing-impaired and will be dubbed in other languages including Spanish, Japanese and Thai. The course is also available in standard definition for those institutions not yet ready for high-definition streaming.