Faculty Panel on HPC Curriculum Enhancement & Student Engagement

Currently, there is increasingly demand for resources and tools made available through new and advanced computing technologies, such as networks, large data analysis, and sophisticated simulation tools that assist in the understanding of natural phenomena. High Performance Computing (HPC) plays an important part in this area. However, undergraduate students lack experience in how HPC functions because most curricula do not cover HPC. To assist in solving this problem, Science Gateways Community Institute obtained external funding to improve undergraduate computing education through enhanced courses. The goal is to incorporate HPC concepts and training across the computing curricula in multiple disciplines to motivate students’ interests in computing and increase their critical thinking skills, which will diversify and strengthen the future workforce in the United States. The panel on HPC Curriculum Enhancements is made up of Minority Serving Institutions (MSI) faculty who have trained in HPC and Gateway technology and are now working to integrate HPC into their assigned computer science classes. The panel will describe the efforts of the NSF Science Gateways Community Institute (SGCI) support to these faculty. The panel will begin with an overview SGCI Faculty HPC/Gateways Program. The faculty panel will also present their lessons learned and next steps in this endeavor. The HBCU represented on the panel are Winston Salem State University, Elizabeth City State University, Norfolk State University, Mississippi Valley, State University, and Jackson State University. The panel will also include feedback from students who engaged in the HPCHack @ADMI22 and the SGCI Summer Coding Institute. As part of this panel, selected students will share their experiences with the Hackathon and Coding Institute. The hackathons aim to harness the resources, skills, and knowledge found in the HPC community in an effort to provide applied exposure for the student participants. The issues presented ranged from programmatic, to societal, to scientific subject areas. The mentors consisted of professors, to programmers, to systems administrators, to professionals in the HPC industry. In preparation for the hackathon, students attended seminars covering the following topics GitHub / Discord (TACC HPC training model), Hackathon Beginning to End, Data to Dashboard, and Cloudy Cluster / Google Cloud. To be eligible to win the Judges, Viewer's Choice, and Open-Source Awards students were required to use some facet of HPC in their solutions. The SGCI Coding Institute is focused on gateway development for undergraduate students. The workshop covers the core skills needed to be productive in design and maintenance of science gateways. The program is presented as short tutorials alternated with practical exercises, and all instruction is done via live coding. The virtual Science Gateway Coding Institute convened June 6-July 1, 2022. Students represented the following MSI: Winston Salem State University, Elizabeth City State University, Norfolk State, Jackson State University, University of the District of Columbia, and Morehouse College