B4. Project Organization

B4.1 The SCSI Workshops

B4.1.2 Special Topics:

These topics will be covered as requested by participating faculty. We anticipate that by the second summer, we will have one track, or an additional workshop section devoted to such special topics.

Supercomputing and Parallel Computing: As faculty become more capable of incorporating models, we find that there is a desire to tackle more realistic problems in science. Unfortunately, many modeling and simulation projects that are suitable for classroom presentation and exploration, once the simple problems are understood, require significant use of high-performance computing resources. The opportunity to explore supercomputing applications (vector and parallel) will be provided through orientation and training sessions. through our partnerships with NCSA and NCSC, computational assignments for the participants will be implemented on a range of computer architectures including Cray and Convex supercomputers and workstations. This will enable the participants to explore applications of supercomputing in their own teaching and research. It is our experience that undergraduate faculty members become more excited about teaching computational science and incorporating computational methods in their other courses when they have learned, first-hand, how to do computational science using the most advanced computers available. Exposure to new ways of solving exciting problems, or visualizing the data from their research, engenders an excitement that will influence both how they teach and what they teach.

Scientific Visualization: An essential component of computational science is visualization. The representation of ever increasing amounts and complexity of data must be addressed in order to understand the output of most computational models. Because too few scientists, engineers, or educators have had the opportunity to explore scientific visualization first-hand, special training will be offered in the afternoon periods.

"Webifying" Models: The Shodor Foundation has developed a specialty in taking models from a variety of sources and linking them with one or more visualization tools and cgi scripts to create web-accessible models. For those faculty interested, we will have time set aside to show how to take a model and make it a web exploration tool.