Project Title: Education Outreach and Training Team – Graduate Student 
Education
Principal Investigator: Geoffrey Fox
Organization: Northeast Parallel Architectures Center(NPAC)
		Syracuse University
		111 College Place
		Syracuse New York 13244-4100
Electronic Mail: gcf@npac.syr.edu Phone:3154432163
Partnership: Illinois(NCSA)

Proposed Activities: This project includes coordination of the Graduate education 
program in the PACI and linkage of it with training activities throughout the Alliance. 
Our plan builds on national experience with computational science education (including 
the courses taught at Syracuse University by Fox) and in particular on experience with an 
NSF MRA grant. The latter involved development of  “train the trainers” material for 
colleges and the Supercomputer centers based largely on technologies produced by 
CRPC. We have also carefully reviewed a large program of this type in the UK which has 
in fact produced some quite interesting curricula on HPCC technologies. We believe 
these existing programs are successful and have identified some good general guide lines. 
These include linkage of academic computational science education with training (a 
missing part of UK effort), proactive effort to distribute material and follow up with users 
who want base material tailored for their needs, use of modern web technology in 
delivery and a careful choice of topics based on strengths of technology providers and 
needs of the users. For instance, reviewing currently available electronic material shows a 
good coverage of HPCC software such as HPF and MPI but a clear need for curricula on 
algorithms and tools. We intend to start this effort with a workshop to identify user 
requirements and see where we should put our initial efforts.
As the training areas for curricula development will depend on this study of requirements 
and availability of existing material, we have left $125,000 to be used by Alliance 
partners to be chosen on the basis of their expertise in producing material.

Affect on Infrastructure: This activity is entirely focused on producing infrastructure in 
that it is transferring results from the ET and AT teams for use in educational materials. 
The net result will be broad based curricula of value to graduate education and user 
training.

Difference from Current Activities: The project build on experiences with an existing 
MRA NSF grant (Retooling) involving Rice NCSU and the Supercomputer centers. 
However this MRA will in fact be completed before the start of the PACI and so this 
linkage involves no overlap in funding. 

Explanation of Cost Sharing: The cost sharing is 1:1 using three sources – University 
funding of Fox’s salary , the state funded InfoMall activities as well NPAC computer 
resources used for initial development work. Note we only cost share the $75000 per year 
assigned to NPAC. Any partners chosen for developing curricula will of course be 
required to have their own cost sharing.