HPCwire: Purdue to Offer HPC Curriculum

The Leading Source for Global News and Information Covering the Ecosystem of High Productivity Computing

HPCwire >> Off the Wire

December 21, 2007

Purdue to Offer HPC Curriculum

Page: 1 of 2
1 | 2 All »

WEST LAFAYETTE, Ind., Dec. 17 -- Purdue University is developing courses that will focus on high-performance computing, making it one of a few universities nationwide to offer such curriculum. The specialization will be offered in the Department of Computer and Information Technology. It will include a course starting in the spring semester in which each student will build a high-performance computer that is about four times more powerful than a standard personal computer.

Such machines can perform a litany of functions, from helping researchers solve mathematical problems to improving automobile design.

"As high-performance computing becomes more commonplace in industry, businesses are finding that they need employees who know how to assemble and maintain these machines," said Thomas Hacker, an assistant professor in the Department of Computer and Information Technology. "There is a huge unmet demand. Students who go through our program will have a definite advantage in the workplace."

The specialization is still in development, but courses in bioinformatics have already been offered. Courses will be crafted for seniors and graduate-level students. Future courses will be dictated by student demand but may include software development, computational biology, molecular pharmacology and data management.

"We will go from bits to biology to the benchtop," Hacker said. "This specialization will be of interest to students in our department, as well as those in biology, engineering, computer science and physics. It will prepare them for jobs in manufacturing, health care and many other areas."

Hacker said students in the spring semester course will assemble a supercomputer from recycled computers from the College of Technology and the Rosen Center for Advanced Computing. Each supercomputer will consist of four nodes, or standard computers, which students will learn how to essentially link together to harness all four computers' power.

"The computers we will be using are all regular machines that you'd find in any office, but what students will gain is the ability to connect these components so that the systems run parallel to each other to gain the power of all the machines for a particular task," he said.

Hacker said students can put these skills to use in any environment.

"Once you have the knowledge, you can easily build a high-performance computer and customize it with hardware, open-source software and various add-ons that enable the machine to handle almost any task," he said.

He said that a growing number of industries are seeing the benefit of high-performance computers, not just to solve complex problems, but also to streamline their processes and make products better.

Page: 1 of 2
1 | 2 All »

Article Tools

Share Options

(Digg, Technorati, more)

Subscribe

Subscribe to HPCwire

Discussion

There are 0 discussion items posted.

Join the Discussion

You must be a registered user in order to comment on HPCwire stories.

Members enjoy:

	Access to Special Content, including Podcasts, Webcasts, and Whitepapers and more!
	Ability to take an active role in the discussions that are shaping the HPC technology discipline!
	Special offers available only to HPCwire members!

Become a Registered User Today!

Registered Users Log in Here to Comment

Email Address:	Password (case sensitive)

Remember me	Forgot Password?

RSS Feeds

Feeds by Topic

Feeds by Industry

Feeds by Content Type

Feature Articles

Moscow State University Supercomputer Has Petaflop Aspirations

The Moscow State University supercomputer, Lomonosov, has been selected for a high-performance makeover, with the goal of tripling its processing power to achieve petaflop-level performance in 2010. T-Platforms, who developed and manufactured the supercomputer, is the odds-on favorite to lead the project.
Read More...

Intel Ups Performance Ante with Westmere Server Chips

Right on schedule, Intel has launched its Xeon 5600 processors, codenamed "Westmere EP." The 5600 represents the 32nm sequel to the Xeon 5500 (Nehalem EP) for dual-socket servers. Intel is touting better performance and energy efficiency, along with new security features, as the big selling points of the new Xeons.
Read More...

The Week in Review

The ACM Turing Award goes to the creator of the modern personal computer; and Voltaire announces a mid-range InfiniBand switch and new technology that accelerates distributed applications. We recap those stories and more in our weekly wrapup.
Read More...

Read more HPCwire features...

Top Headlines

Intel Partners See 'Easy' Upgrade Path With Xeon 5600 Chips

Mar 18 | ChannelWeb | Westmere parts already showing up in HPC machines. Read more...

AMD: OEMs primed for Opteron 6100s

Mar 17 | The Register | But what about the tier ones? Read more...

Arrival of the Desktop Supercomputer

Mar 17 | Cadalyst Magazine | A new generation of workstations is changing the nature of technical computing. Read more...

Scheduling HPC In The Cloud

Mar 17 | Linux Magazine | Latest iteration of Sun Grid Engine able to tap into Cloud. Read more...

Tailoring Medicine with Supercomputers

Mar 16 | Bio-IT World | Biotech firm builds genetic models from patient data. Read more...

Read more headlines...

Featured Whitepapers

Virtualization for Aggregation And The vSMP Architecture™

Jan 12 | | In-depth look at vSMP Foundation server virtualization technology, technical implementation, use cases and capabilities. The technical whitepaper provides an architectural overview and details on the three vSMP Foundation products: vSMP Foundation for SMP, vSMP Foundation for Cluster and vSMP Foundation for Cloud.

Copper Cable Technologies for High Performance Computing

Jan 18 | | This white paper discusses Gore’s copper cable assemblies, and how they continue to exceed the standards for providing reliable, cost-effective solutions for high-performance computer applications.

View the White Paper Library

Multimedia

Webcast: Virtualized Data Center Roundtable

Join this online panel discussion for live Q&A with leading industry experts, analysts, and end-users to discuss the latest innovations, best practices, barriers to implementation, and measurable benefits of server virtualization with a particular focus on today's real world solutions.

Webcast: Watch SC09 Birds of a Feather Video: Scalable Fault-Tolerant HPC Supercomputers

Learn about scalable fault-tolerant architectures and examples of energy efficient and scalable supercomputing clusters using dual QDR InfiniBand to combine capacity computing with network failover capabilities with the help of programming languages such as MPI and a robust Linux cluster management package.

Webcast: High Performance Computing for a Smarter Planet

LIVE@SCO9: The IBM team discusses new innovations in hardware, software and services that help clients better understand their workloads and get insight from their R&D efforts. Technology demonstrations include the soon-to-be-released Power7 HPC processor, the DCS990 system with 2.4 petabytes of storage, the xCAT management tool, secure HPC cloud computing and more. Winners of two HPCwire Readers' and Editors’ Choice Awards! Take the IBM virtual tour at SC09 or more information go online to: http://www-03.ibm.com/systems/deepcomputing/sc09.html