BATON ROUGE — High-performance computing is impacting science, engineering and industry in profound ways, quickly outpacing other fields to become the leading technology of the 21st century.
As businesses use supercomputing to spur economic development and find newer, more creative ways to develop their products, knowledge of supercomputing is becoming a critical advantage in today’s workplace.
However, many college students do not receive instruction in this crucial field. Often, it's not because they choose not to study it, but because their colleges and universities do not offer the opportunity.
LSU computer science professor Thomas Sterling hopes to change that through a new course being offered this semester.
“High-Performance Computing: Concepts, Methods and Means,” is enabled by advanced, Internet-based video technologies provided by the LSU Center for Computation and Technology.
Sterling hopes the course will help level the playing field for today’s college students by giving them a sufficient collegiate background in high-performance computing, so they can eventually work in this field anywhere in the country as well as internationally.
Sterling’s course, the only one of its kind in the country, marks the first use of high-definition video broadcast via the Internet – meaning the course not only is offered at LSU, but through advances in technology, is being exported to schools internationally.
“Every student should have a chance,” Sterling said. “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.”
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 (LONI) and other information technology programs for things we do in everyday life – in this case, education.”
There are two key reasons most universities do not offer high-performance computing courses: first, the technology is just now emerging and is not available everywhere; and second, there is not always a qualified professor who could teach such a course.
The technology component is made possible at LSU through LONI, a high-speed, fiber optics network that links supercomputers at major research sites throughout Louisiana.
LONI allows the boundaries between universities to be blurred, so 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.”
The course, which began on Jan. 16, 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.
“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,” said Ludek Matyska of Masaryk University. “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 next spring
“With this technology, where the campus is located does not matter,” Sterling said. “My goal is for anyone, anywhere, who wants to learn about this to at least have the opportunity to choose.”
Publish Date:
01-25-2007
