SSP 1995 project summary:

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Teaching High Performance Computing via the World Wide Web

The Web is currently exciting much interest in the media as well as the scientific community. If it is to fulfil its potential, it is essential that it is put to practical use, not just for entertainment. As the nature of work and Universities change, there is much interest in distance learning material, enabling students to work and learn in their own time. Already, programmes in the US exist, targeted solely at writing such materials and using the Web as the main means of delivery. As a leading HPC centre, it is important that EPCC is involved in the production and delivery of distance learning materials.

We would like to explore various possibilities to use the WWW to promote the awareness and use of HPC. As part of the EPCC Training and Education Centre~(EPCC-TEC), we are involved in investigating new techniques for teaching HPC skills. We already use the WWW to disseminate course material and reports and we have already put the MPI course notes up in HTML format. We are currently looking at producing an interactive version of the MPI course using the EPIC (EPcc Interactive Courseware) package produced by Martin Westhead. The aim is that people could transfer a file to their local space and have a version of the course complete with a set of interactive exercises. These exercises can be edited, compiled and run on a local machine with the various processes controlled by the EPIC package.

It would be interesting and useful to do something similar for another course. We should concentrate on courses which are useful locally for training new staff and/or TRACS visitors. Possibilities include:

• High Performance Fortran
• Scientific Visualisation: A Practical Introduction
• Introduction to Computational Science

Another task, if the time were available, would be to consider other ways to use WWW to promote HPC skills. This is a more open-ended task and might require some lateral thinking.

Proposed Workplan

• Week 1: Training Course
• Week 2: Investigating WWW and learning HTML
• Week 3: Surveying the available WWW teaching materials
• Week 4: Trying out `MPI on WWW', and a short report on (dis)advantages of WWW for teaching
• Weeks 5-8: Producing HTML version of (parts of) chosen course(s)
• Weeks 9: Explore other uses of WWW (another short report)
• Week 10: Report

While there is useful project work to be done in translating an existing course onto WWW, this is not the only worthwhile activity. (Indeed, this task could be completed by a member of EPCC-TEC after the summer, allowing significant flexibility depending on the rate of progress of the student.) Perhaps more importantly, we are very interested in any ideas the student discovers which could improve our use of WWW. The deliverables would include course exercises on the WWW and two short reports as described above.

In summary, the production of training materials for WWW is a new and exciting area and could provide a Summer Scholarship Student with an interesting and achievable project.

Christian Farley worked on this project.

A TAR file containing compressed PostScript of the project's final report is available here (85983 bytes) . Since Christian's work was so WWW oriented, his report is also available as a Web document here.

Webpage maintained by mario@epcc.ed.ac.uk