CompEx
Computation Exploration: An Introduction to High Performance Computing
Feel free to Download the Abstract for Computation Exploration sent to TeraGrid '08 for presentation.
Computation Exploration was created as a series of educational courses, and the Introduction to High Performance Computing lesson was developed as the first module. Although a team of seven constructed and presented all of this content, I worked under the direct supervision of PSC's HPC Administrator Robin Flaus throughout the project.
I was responsible for developing some of the "Introduction to UNIX" content, creating a MPI guide, revising and editting the entire document, as well as writing the solution code for the assignments given to the students. Specifically, the students were asked to produce code, in C, that could run in parallel on multiple machines using MPI. One of the final programs the students wrote used MPI to solve a Sudoku Puzzle using a brute-force "guess and check" algorithm. The Sudoku example was inspired after my award-winning high school science fair project entitled Task Division using Multi-threading, in which I used Java's threading capabilities to computationally solve a Sudoku Puzzle in parallel on multiple machines.
After finalizing the program guide, starter code, and solutions, the program went live in Upper St. Clair High School just after the students returned from winter break (Spring '09). The PSC Staff made approximately biweekly trips out to the classroom during which I was able to help the students with the class and in effect student teach for a semester.
