April 2006 (Vol. 7, No. 4) 1541-4922/06/$26.00 © 2006 IEEE Published by the IEEE Computer Society Education: High-Performance Computing in Community Colleges?
At first glance, it's hard to fathom that high-performance computing could have any role in community colleges. This seeming incongruity reminds me of Berkeley Farms' marketing slogan when I was growing up: "Farms in Berkeley?" Perhaps Contra Costa College's HPC program should implement a similar questioning—without the trailing "moo" that accompanied the Berkeley Farms ads. After all, our campus is within 10 miles of the University of California, Berkeley. Curriculum development Contra Costa College's HPC program is vocational, preparing students to be Linux cluster administrators. It began with a US National Science Foundation-sponsored consortium of four community colleges tasked with developing an HPC technician curriculum reflective of the local community. The four colleges would then combine these programs to form a national curriculum. Our first goal was to recruit an advisory board of working experts in HPC. Our team included representatives from nearby laboratories (Lawrence Berkeley National Lab, Sandia National Lab, NASA Ames, and the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center) and businesses (Pixar Animation Studios, Global Netoptex, Street Tech, Incyte Genomics, Silicon Graphics, and IBM). Over two years, volunteers spent more than 100 hours at monthly meetings, where I plied them with Snickers bars, Mountain Dew, and other foods tempting to geeks (I'd learned a few things during my 30 years as a software engineer with Control Data, Multiflow, and SGI). We designed a curriculum whose courses Once we identified the necessary job skills, we added an additional constraint: whenever possible, express those skills in terms of courses typically available at other community colleges. This would benefit students who had taken comparable courses elsewhere as well as let colleges more easily integrate the HPC curriculum with their preexisting classes. While we were doing all this, we saw that we could also help students by preparing them for various Computing Technology Industry Association (CompTIA) exams. The association offers vendor-neutral certification exams, such as A+ (PC maintenance and repair), Linux+ (Linux system administration), Network+ (network support and administration), and Security+ (computer and information security). Course details We partitioned the curriculum into courses (http://www.contracosta.edu/hpc/academics/courses) that trained students as entry-level Linux system administrators and a shorter series of HPC-centric courses that leveraged the base courses. We offered the courses on weeknights between 6:30 p.m. and 9:30 pm to accommodate both adults interested in retraining themselves and typical community college students. The general Linux system administration courses we offer are The HPC-specific courses we offer are Previously, it was possible for a student to nail the theory without having a clue how to apply it. So, we split all the courses except HPC-270 into two separate courses—lecture and lab. This ensures that students are competent in both theory and practice. Student development We recruited 25 students by visiting high schools, government-sponsored employment agencies, and A+ training centers. We also briefed college counselors every six months so they could accurately advise potential students. Now, two years later, we'll graduate our first students—all two of them. Many students realized that the program wasn't appropriate for them or that they weren't ready to put in the time and effort necessary. Some students didn't take or didn't pass all the classes. One student was hired, which was both exciting and a little disappointing because he didn't graduate. The HPC students are a tight group that studies together and helps new students. The second cadre was composed of 15 students. We use Yahoo Group and Yahoo Chat to communicate. Six students from the first group—the two who are graduating and four students who have additional classes to take—are doing advanced projects for us, such as investigating alternatives to removable hard drives and working with students from Earlham College and the University of Northern Iowa (UNI) on a Bootable Cluster CD-based OS (http://bccd.cs.uni.edu) for our portable traveling cluster, Little-Fe (http://contracosta.edu/hpc/resources/Little_Fe). (For more information on Little-Fe, see http://news.taborcommunications.com /msgget.jsp?mid=494184&xsl=story.xsl.) We're working with Diablo Valley College and Los Medanos College to offer our HPC program to their students by exploiting the foundation courses they already teach. We're also working with Middle College High School to develop an HPC program that will let their juniors and seniors complete our HPC degree with only one year of additional study. Other future plans include transforming the HPC-specific courses into distance-education courses to more easily extend the program to other colleges. (For more information on developments in computational science education, see http://news.taborcommunications.com/ msgget.jsp?mid=461139&xsl=story.xsl.) We're also working to help students develop an infrastructure for success: we provide one to three PCs on which they can experiment with Linux, clustering software, and removable drive support. Our current best-of-breed model for removable drive support is a US$11 cage for a laptop hard drive, complete with USB cables for connection and power. Being able to work at home and explore Linux usage and administration has been the biggest indicator for success with our HPC program—well, actually working at home on these things is the biggest indicator of success because students can explore HPC concepts and practice to their hearts' content. Conclusion HPC in the community college is certainly a work in progress. We'll soon add a second HPC-related program to the mix—a two-year AS degree in computational science education covering core math, computer science, chemistry, biology, and physics classes as well as parallel programming and message-passing interface courses. We've also submitted a proposal to the NSF to create a research-quality supercomputer solely for computational science education, which we hope will break the top 100 of the TOP500 list (http://www.top500.org). We'd ship a quarter of the racks of this supercomputer to four colleges: Contra Costa College, Earlham College, UNI, and Kean University. Our HPC students would maintain our hardware and software as front-line HPC technicians, with Earlham and UNI students as their backline. Stay tuned for the ongoing saga of this educational experiment. Tom Murphy is the computer science program chair, West County robotics coach, and director of the Center for High Performance Computing at Contra Costa College. Contact him at tmurphy@contracosta.edu; http://contracosta.edu/cs/murphy. Related Links
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were teachable in two years (that is, we paired approximately 30 HPC units with appropriate general education courses to form a 60-unit, two-year AS degree),