Educational Issues in E-Science in Australia

1. Educational Issues in E-Science in Australia Kevin Burrage Federation Fellow of the ARC – kb@maths.uq.edu.au UQ, Brisbane, Australia October 2004

2. Contents • Background: • Education in Australia • APAC • APAC Partners • GRANGENET • QPSF • Two Exemplar Projects in QPSF: • Teaching via Access Nodes • Multimatlab • Issues and Conclusions.

3. Background

4. 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.

5. 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.

6. 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.

7. 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.

8. 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.

9. Exemplar Projects

10. 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.

11. 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.

12. 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.

13. 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.

14. 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.

15. Conclusions and Issues

16. 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.

17. Thanks • Pamela Burrage, Geoff Ericksson, Steve Jeffrey (UQ) • Karen Haines (UWA) • Anne Trefethen (UK E-science)