Teaching interdisciplinary computational science from an electronic book on the Internet

The advances in high performance computing technology have led to great changes in the way applied and pure sciences are being carried out. These advances have left curricula at the graduate level in many disciplines omitting a whole body of essential research tools that students have to seek out on their own to carry out their research. In many cases the skills are not difficult to assimilate and the student develops the required knowledge during the process of carrying out research. Usually this is not a systematic approach, and it often leaves the student with a fragmented knowledge of some of the increasingly important concepts and areas relating to computing. By offering a general introduction and overview to networks, computer architectures, scientific visualization, programming languages, a variety of operating systems and hypertext authoring tools students get a broad comprehensive view of modern high performance computing methodologies. Students from all disciplines benefit from such a course. The survey of such tools is ideally suited for an interdisciplinary curriculum. As high performance computing becomes an essential component of the University curriculum, instructors need to be prepared to incorporate these concepts and methods in their own research and curricula. At this point in time educators are uncertain as to how to proceed, and there appears to be a lack of consensus on the curriculum for computational science. The Computational Science Education Project was initiated in September 1991, by the Department of Energy to develop a syllabus for teaching interdisciplinary computational science. The interdisciplinary nature of the project is intended to contribute to national technological competitiveness by producing a body of graduates with the necessary skills to operate effectively in high performance computing environments