Educational Issues in EScience in Australia
Kevin Burrage
Federation Fellow of the ARC – kb@maths.uq.edu.au
UQ, Brisbane, Australia
October 2004
Contents
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Background:
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Two Exemplar Projects in QPSF:
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Education in Australia
APAC
APAC Partners
GRANGENET
QPSF
Teaching via Access Nodes
Multimatlab
Issues and Conclusions.
Background
Education in Australia
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35 Universities
19 Million people
Vast distances
Good communication networks
Higher Education – a multibillion dollar industry
Many overseas graduate students (Asia)
Overseas campuses – expensive
Initiatives such as Universitas 21.
Australian Partnership in Advanced Computing
„ http://www.apac.edu.au/
„ Research support.
„ Education.
„ Tech Diffusion.
Education
„ http://www.apac.edu.au/project_proposals/EOT/
„ Shared educational modules between universities
at graduate and undergraduate levels.
APAC Partners and Projects (Education)
Modules in
„ AC3 – SMP programming and VTK.
„ ANU – graphics, data mining, MPI.
„ IVEC – bioinformatics – web servers, graphics.
„ QPSF - computational engineering,
Multimatlab and teaching via access nodes.
„ SAPAC – MPI.
„ TPAC – visualisation for earth systems, digital
libraries.
„ VPAC – engineering case studies.
GRid And Next GEneration Network
http://www.grangenet.net
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Three year program to
operate a multi-gigabit
network supporting IPv6
and IPv4 and multicast.
„ 10 gigabit backbone Melbourne,Canberra,Sydney
„ 5 gigabits into Brisbane.
„ Small annual membership fee for the three years.
„ Used for all Research and Education (R&E) traffic.
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QPSF
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Consortium of 6 Queensland Universities.
All with access nodes.
http://www.qpsf.edu.au/
James Cook University - Masters in Computational
Engineering with the University of Wales.
Griffith University - undergraduate courses in HPC.
The University of Queensland - courses in HPC,
Scientific Visualisation, computer graphics. Access
nodes in treaching. New Major, within BSc. degree,
in Computational Science.
QUT - Graduate Diploma and Masters in Scientific
Computation and Visualisation.
Exemplar Projects
Graduate course in Graphics via
AccessGrid Sessions
Semester 2, 2004: UQ and UWA shared 6 lectures for a
component of an Advanced Visualisation course.
‹ 10 students at each institution.
‹ Dr Pamela Burrage (UQ) - Curves and Surfaces.
‹ Dr Karen Haines (UWA) Programmable Graphics PU.
Outcomes:
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University credit for students attending the subject.
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Students found the experience interesting and valued the
chance to attend lectures given by leaders located on the
other side of Australia.
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Students enthusiastic about attending the lectures.
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Other Issues
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Lecturers need to consider the presentation
style, to encourage interaction between students
(at each venue) and the lecturer.
Need a “whiteboard”, for impromptu explanations
or diagrams of course content.
Need a way of running programs easily at each
venue.
There were some teething problems:
‹ The audio in one session was patchy.
‹ Used ‘Shared Presentation” using OpenOffice
but not all equation objects (in powerpoint)
were displayed properly.
‹ Advantage of OpenOffice is that only 1 person
needs to control the advance to the next slide.
MultiMATLAB
Background
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Cleve Moler - mid-1980’s; an Intel iPSC. ( “Why there isn’t a
parallel MATLAB”, MathWorks Newsletter, 1995).
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Anne Trefethen - 1993; MATLAB was run on multiple nodes
of an IBM SP-1, using a Fortran wrapper.
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MathWorks support the initial development of MultiMATLAB
by a group of researchers at the Cornell Theory Center (A.
Trefethen, C. Myers) and the Department of Computer
Science (V. Menon, C. Chang, G. Czajkowski, N.Trefethen).
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MultiMATLAB project was dormant before being revived by
Anne Trefethen (on a 1-year visit to ACMC-University of
Queensland) and G. Ericksson (ACMC) in 2004.
Aim
„ to use MultiMATLAB as a teaching tool for parallel
programming in a third year computational science
subject at UQ in Semester 1, 2005.
Issues
„ Students in scientific computing are doing less
programming in Fortran and C.
„ Students already familiar with MATLAB will be able
to learn parallel programming in a known
environment.
„ This will allow them to focus on actual parallel
programming constructs which they can implement
using a few simple MultiMATLAB commands.
Background
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MultiMATLAB allows multiple instances of MATLAB
to communicate with each other, with MATLAB
scripts parallellised across multiple processors.
A user starts up multiple instances of MATLAB
These processes are usually run on separate
processors. They can execute commands on the
other processors (e.g. Eval(‘…’);) or distribute the
data amongst the processors (e.g. Distribute(‘x’);)
The usual message-passing commands are
available (e.g. Send, Recv, Bcast) as well as global
reduction commands (e.g. Min, Max, Sum).
MultiMATLAB provides multi-processor Graphics.
Conclusions and Issues
Access Grids in Education
„ Get the right supporting technologies.
„ Small scale subjects only.
„ Fee paying courses into Asia – Universitas 21.
„ Ideal for sharing material and lecturer expertise
between universities – smaller universities.
„ Need to broaden user base through small grants.
Other issues
„ Repositories.
„ New paradigms for teaching HPC – Multimatlab.
Thanks
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Pamela Burrage, Geoff Ericksson, Steve Jeffrey
(UQ)
Karen Haines (UWA)
Anne Trefethen (UK E-science)