Educational Issues in E-Science in Australia

Kevin Burrage

Federation Fellow of the ARC – kb@maths.uq.edu.au

UQ, Brisbane, Australia

October 2004

Contents Background:

Education in Australia APAC APAC Partners GRANGENET QPSF

Two Exemplar Projects in QPSF: Teaching via Access Nodes Multimatlab

Issues and Conclusions.

Background

Education in Australia 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 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.

QPSF 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: University credit for students attending the subject. Students found the experience interesting and valued the

chance to attend lectures given by leaders located on the other side of Australia.

Students enthusiastic about attending the lectures.

Other Issues

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 Cleve Moler - mid-1980’s; an Intel iPSC. ( “Why there isn’t a

parallel MATLAB”, MathWorks Newsletter, 1995). Anne Trefethen - 1993; MATLAB was run on multiple nodes

of an IBM SP-1, using a Fortran wrapper. 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).

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

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 Pamela Burrage, Geoff Ericksson, Steve Jeffrey

(UQ) Karen Haines (UWA) Anne Trefethen (UK E-science)