XSEDE and the University of California, Berkeley are offering an online course on parallel computing for graduate students and advanced undergraduates and are seeking other university partners that are interested in offering the course for credit to their students. The course includes online video lectures, quizzes, and homework assignments with access to free accounts on the NSF supported XSEDE supercomputers. Last year the course included participants from 17 different institutions with students from a variety of backgrounds that successfully completed the course.
Participating institutions will need to provide a local instructor that will be responsible for advising the local students and officially assigning grades. Students will complete the online course quizzes and exercises as part of their grade and can then undertake a final group project supervised by the local instructor. The course will begin on January 20, 2015 and end on May 8, 2015. Course materials can be reviewed at “https://www.cac.cornell.edu/VW/apc/default.aspx“.
The XSEDE and UC Berkeley staff will meet with local instructors online every two weeks and also help with answers to student questions using an online forum. Local instructors may design their own group project or choose from a number of projects that have been undertaken by students in the past.
For examples of class projects done in previous semesters at UC Berkeley, see below for the 27 videos – starting with students presenting their projects – from the Spring 2013 offering. The student posters from Spring 2009 can be seen at at “http://www.cs.berkeley.edu/~demmel/cs267_Spr09/posters.html“:
A second course aimed at undergraduates, Engineering Parallel Software is currently being taught and will be offered again in Autumn 2015.
Instructors interested in the collaborative class should contact Steve Gordon, lead for the XSEDE education program at “sgordon@osc.edu” or by phone at 614-292-4132.
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