Education and outreach
Computing grants to classrooms
SCD continues to provide access to its supercomputers for undergraduate and graduate university classes. Computing resources are provided for students engaged in modeling and simulations requiring high performance computers, and for classes studying recently introduced architectures. SCD also provides computing resources to graduate students in the atmospheric and related sciences for their thesis research.
Earth System Modeling Framework project workshop organization and support
Cecelia DeLuca in CSS organized and led a hands-on tutorial session February 20, 2002 to introduce Earth System Modeling Framework (ESMF) participants to the framework development environment. The training session was held at the NCAR Corporate Training Center.
Adaptive and High-order Methods with Applications in Turbulence conference organization
Steve Thomas co-organized, in collaboration with Annick Pouquet of the Geophysical Turbulence Program, a scientific conference entitled Adaptive and High-order Methods with Applications in Turbulence. This conference was held at NCAR in March 2002. The workshop lasted three days and had 15 invited speakers, with an additional four graduate student and post-doctoral presentations. The conference brought together approximately 30 scientists interested in the numerical simulation aspects of turbulence.
Visualization Lab outreach and educational activities
VETS continued its outreach program with appearances at SC2001, CAS2002, AMS2002, SIGGRAPH2002, and VETS supported the normal heavy schedule of Visualization Lab presentations (59 total) to visiting researchers, students, educators, and other visiting groups. The schedule also included a large addition of interactive videoconferencing sessions (21 total + regularly scheduled weekly and monthly meetings) using the Access Grid technology. One Access Grid event in particular involved outreach to both local and remote school kids in a presentation and discussion on wildfires as part of NCAR's participation in the Global Science and Technology Week webcast and Access Grid event. VETS coordinated NCAR's participation with several other remote sites including presentations from President Bush's Science Advisor and the Director of the National Science Foundation.
A list of other education and outreach presentations in the Vislab appear in this report at VETS education and outreach activities.
In an effort to provide the general public and school children exposure to high-end visualization and state-of-the-art scientific data exploration techniques, VETS also began implementation of a joint project with the NCAR Education and Outreach Public Visitor Program to provide visualization theater access for regular demonstrations to school children and public visitors.
Networking conference hosting
SCD's Network Engineering and Telecommunications Section sponsored and hosted numerous networking conferences, seminars, meetings, and training sessions during FY2002. NETS staff served as chairs, hosts, panel members, and presenters throughout the year. The primary events were:
- Net100 Workshop
- Caching Workshop
- February 2002 Westnet Meeting
- July 2002 Westnet Meeting
- Other meetings for NLANR
Undergraduate Summer Leadership Workshop support
SCD assisted with the Undergraduate Summer Leadership Workshop. Aaron Andersen provided a tour of the computing facilities and answered numerous questions posed by the participants, ranging from computational capabilities to career possibilities in computer and computational science.
Latinas Building Bridges in Education program support
Dorothy Bustamante participates as a member of the Boulder County Latina Women's League (BCLWL), a non-profit organization that focuses on creating educational opportunities for Latina middle and high school students. This year BCLWL sponsored its second annual Latinas Building Bridges in Education, a program that matches Latina high school and middle school students with professional women in the community, with the goal of providing Latina girls exposure to the professional world. Forty-seven girls spent the morning shadowing their professional mentors, eight of these mentors were from UCAR/NCAR. In the afternoon, the mentors and the students met for a luncheon and several educational workshops. Dorothy's participation included finding mentors, matching the students with their mentors, serving as a liaison between the schools and BCLWL, and transporting students from school to the workplace, to the luncheon, and returning the students to their school or home. This year Dorothy met with the Millennium Trust Foundation to discuss next year's conference after the Latina League's proposal had made the final cut. The league was awarded $5,000 for the 2003 conference.