NPAC Contributions to the NHSE

A roadmap to HPCC enabling technologies and software is being created as an integrated heirarchy of information, including the following levels:

A glossary with brief explanations of HPCC terms, algorithms, applications, and enabling technologies.
Further information on each topic, some of it structured and created manually (such as pointers to more detailed information and software), and some of it unstructured and extracted by automated procedures (search engines).
Pointers to relevant software in the NHSE.
More comprehensive overviews of some enabling HPCC technologies, applications and algorithms, in the form of short review articles (similar to encyclopedia articles) written by experts in the field. Overviews are being developed for areas such as cluster computing, data parallel languages, random number generators, matrix algorithms, and optimization.
A collection of material relevant to HPF has been prepared and current efforts are focussed on improving quality and presentation of material. There are approximately 15 certified HPF exemplars which can be used to test compilers or give examples to users. This is being elaborated additional descriptive material setting exemplars in context of application classes.
A description of HPCC systems was prepared which has especial values in cases where vendors are no longer in business and so cannot be relied on for Web Pages

Future:

A mixture of structured (manually created) and unstructured (automatically created) information is necessary since HPCC technologies change so rapidly that it is impossible for the maintainers of the roadmap to keep all the entries up-to-date.
Thus we intend to rework our current and future systems so that are mixes of careful "high-value" structured data and appropriate search engine/Generic Web links.
For instance in our latest computational science class, students were given structured material (online) -- foilsets/pointers to chapters in books such as CSEP but also an Oracle based search engine for several books (Parallel Computing Works, CSEP, Ian Foster's) and USENET news groups for the fall in 90 computing areas.
We will expand this model to other parts of the roadmap
We have in hand substantial amounts of educational material from both Syracuse and other computational science projects at both universities and supercomputer centers/National laboratories.
We will organize this material so it can be used more effectively as a roadmap by linking with other NHSE resources -- such as relevant software!
For instance PVM/MPI software will be linked to educational material on message passing programming paradigmn.

In technology area, we have developed with other funding two particularly interesting capabilities

1)Search capabilities gotten by linking (parallel) Oracle with full text search to the Web
2)A prototype Web based presentation software WebFoil