Getting HPC into Regional University Curricula with Few Resources

Karl Frinkle is an applied mathematician who earned his PhD from the University of New Mexico. He is deeply interested in numerical simulations, and most recently in parallel programming. Karl joined the SE Mathematics department in 2005, and thoroughly enjoys teaching parallel programming courses with Mike Morris through the CS department. He also can be found teaching physics courses in the Physics department. Mike Morris' degrees are in math, but he has always said he wound up on the business end of a computer. He taught Computer Science (CS) in the early 80s after working as an Operations Research Analyst for Conoco in Ponca City OK. Mike left teaching and spent 15 years doing various things in the CS industry before returning to Southeastern Oklahoma State to once again teach CS, where he remains today.We showcase our successful project of injecting high performance computing (HPC) into the traditional computer science curriculum at Southeastern Oklahoma State University. We incorporated a three-semester sequence of parallel programming courses, with the third course focusing on a research-level mathematical project that was executed on OU's supercomputer. Emphasis was placed on utilizing Open MPI and CUDA libraries along with parallel algorithm analysis and file I/O optimization. We recruited students with varied CS backgrounds for the program, some with only CS-1 in their portfolios. These courses are currently being followed with a more hardware-oriented course this fall, which will be profiled in the talk. We will discuss our approach to making this a successful sequence of courses and divulge many of the tips and tricks we have learned from our efforts.University of Oklahoma (http://ou.edu)OU Supercomputing Center for Education & Research (http://www.oscer.ou.edu)N