HD Virtual School at Northwestern

Northwestern University Information Technology is supporting a Virtual School of Computational Science and Engineering course, which is hosted by the Virtual School – a collaboration of over 30 universities, research institutions and centers across the United States.

The technology bridging each site together is leveraging high-definition H.323 videoconferencing to provide the best possible audio and video to the students.  Also participating in this VSCSE course is the National Institute for Computation Sciences at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee, the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder Colorado, the University of Minnesota Supercomputing Institute and a number of other national centers, institutes and universities.  For a complete list of the 10 participating sites, view the VSCSE site list.

The first week-long course, Petascale Programming Environments and Tools, will run from July 6th to July 9th and includes a number of project sessions where the students will develop programming skills which utilize high performance computing resources.  About two dozen students and a number of NUIT Academic and Research Technologies High Performance Computing staff are participating in the course here at Northwestern.

The third week-long course, Proven Algorithmic Techniques for Many-core Processors, also hosted at Northwestern from August 2-6, will further enhance the student’s development of multi-core development and programming.

This partnership with the VSCSE is a firm commitment from Northwestern and it’s approach to high performance computing.  The growth of multi-core programming development and abroad will be a key focus for Northwestern now, in the immediate future and years to come.