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Educational activities

SCD has a vibrant education and outreach program. We collaborate with UCAR's Education and Outreach program such that we complement and support their endeavors. We also represent our program of scientific supercomputing at conferences and other events, and we support an aggressive and busy schedule of Visualization Lab demonstrations and presentations for a wide variety of visiting audiences, ranging from scientific through educational. Lastly, SCD provides training and promotes other activities that support the use of our services and the proliferation of advanced technologies to the university community.

For many years, SCD has provided an ongoing series of seminars on computing topics for the user community. In FY2003, SCD organized and hosted 20 seminars.

SCD's Network Engineering and Telecommunications Section sponsored and hosted numerous networking conferences, seminars, meetings, and training sessions during FY2003. NETS staff served as chairs, hosts, panel members, committee members and presenters throughout the year. The primary events were:

  • January 2003 Westnet Meeting

  • July 2003 Westnet Meeting

  • Pete Siemsen spoke with 8 visiting students from DeVry University on networking topics.

  • Pete Siemsen spoke to students at a community college in Longmont on networking topics.

  • Jeff Custard worked with a graduate student in the Radio-TV-Film program of the University of Texas at Austin on a project using NCAR as a case study for an IP Telephony deployment.

  • David Mitchell presented a seminar on jumbo frames.

  • Jeff Custard and Teresa Shibao presented numerous VoIP talks to: NCAB, Cisco, Westnet, and all divisions converting to VoIP.

SCD's Visualization and Enabling Technologies Section continued a very strong outreach program, providing dozens of presentations in our Visualization Lab. We also spun up a new program, informally called VizKids, where UCAR's Public Visitors Program (PVP) prepares and delivers highly visual presentations to visiting educational groups, and the results thus far have been very positive. Through teamwork, we are able to accommodate a much greater number of visitors with only a modest impact on SCD technical staff. We also engaged in an outreach activity to provide Howard University in Washington, D.C. with an AccessGrid node for their atmospheric sciences program. We had a strong presence at the SC2002 conference and showed off a new design scheme in our exhibit, one that emphasized our computing, visualization, and research efforts as well as our sponsorship by NSF (and other agencies, to a lesser degree). SC2002 was our only formal exhibit in FY2003, which reflected the implementation of our strategic plan to reduce our exhibit participation in conferences in favor of more technical R&D and a growing, stronger presence presenting and publishing papers. This new direction recouped a substantial amount of high-level staff time.

Dr. Natasha Flyer made a presentation on the role of scientists and technology in today's society to a visiting class of business majors from the University of Denver. Dr. Flyer visited Fairview High School in Boulder to present "What is it like to be a mathematician/scientist?".

Greg Woods has a teaching appointment at the Colorado School of Mines, Golden, Colorado, as a member of the Colorado Higher Education Computing Organization.

Steve Worley presented "Critique of NESDIS Data Users Services" NOAA/NESDIS User Workshops, 11-12 June 2003, at NIST, Boulder, Colorado.

Seminars

November 13, 2002
"Improving the Performance of Large-Scale Linear System Solution in Distributed Computing Environments"
Presented By: Dr. Masha Sosonkina, University of Minnesota

November 22, 2002
"The Elusive Time-Space Corner Singularity: A Multiple-Scale Phenomenon"
Presented By: Dr. Natasha Flyer, Dept, of Applied Mathematics, University of Colorado

November 25, 2002
"A Spectral Element Method with hp Mesh Adaption"
Presented By: Huiyu Feng, George Washington University

January 13, 2003
"Tips and Tricks for Enhanced Performance on the SGI Origin 3000 Systems"
Presented By: Ilene Carpenter, SGI

January 31, 2003
"Domain decomposition methods: A tool for software re-engineering"
Presented By: Amik St-Cyr, McGill University Montreal, Canada

February 21, 2003
"The Enhancement of Rossby Wave Breaking by Steep Potential Vorticity Gradients in the Winter Stratosphere"
Presented By: Dr. Richard Scott, Columbia University

Thursday-Friday, March 27-28, 2003
"POWER4 for SP Users"
Presented By: Jim Tuccillo, IBM

March 26, 2003
"Introduction to the IBM SP-cluster systems"
Presented By: Jim Tuccillo, IBM

April 11, 2003
"Partitioning with Space-Filling Curves on the Cubed-Sphere"
Presented By: John Dennis, CSS/NCAR

May 20, 2003
"Introduction to using MPI-IO"
Presented By: Jim Tuccillo, IBM

May 21, 2003
"Introduction to the IBM SP-cluster systems"
Presented By: Jim Tuccillo, IBM

May 22-23, 2003
"POWER4 for SP Users"
Presented By: Jim Tuccillo, IBM

June 11, 2003
"Cray XI Technical Briefing"
Presented By: Per Nyberg

June 13, 2003
"Jaguar for Scientists"
Presented By: John Martellaro, Apple Computer

June 19, 2003
"Computing on the sphere: Part I"
Presented By: Dr. Paul Swarztrauber, CSS/NCAR

June 24, 2003
"Computing on the sphere: Part II"
Presented By: Dr. Paul Swarztrauber, CSS/NCAR

June 26, 2003
"Computing on the sphere: Part III"
Presented By: Dr. Paul Swarztrauber, CSS/NCAR

July 10, 2003
"Implicit normal modes of the shallow-water equations on a sphere"
Presented by: Clive Temperton, ECMWF

July 31, 2003
"Upscaling of Soil Hydraulic Properties by Homogenization Theory"
Presented by: Rosangela Sviercoski, University of Arizona, Department of Mathematics