Howdy. My son attends a Science and Tech focused high school here in beautiful New Jersey. This is a pretty neat place for a high school, about 70% of the faculty has their PhD Kids take about 2-4 semesters of physics and chemistry, there are lots of computers, they teach Scheme as well as C++, Java, etc. Freshmen get the option of taking things like Number Theory. Interesting place.
However, I have a thought. There is, to my knowledge, essentially zero exposure to high-performance computing at this school. And I think this is a mistake. My thinking is this. I have observed that in materials science, in medical imaging, in genetics, even in theoretical mathematical studies, these days you see a lot of applied high-performance computing. I get the impression (back me up here if it's otherwise) that skills in high-performance computing have a fair amount of value, and are growing in terms of overall industry demand. Yet smart kids really have very little exposure to these classes of problems, even if there are exposed to the problems themselves. These kids can take a class in genomics, and they even learn about some classes of problems in genomics or proteomics where you need to run large mathematical problems to get 'concrete results' towards practical studies or applications in the problem domain, but they are kept far from actual hands-on or low (or even high) level theory in terms of actual implementations or even engineering considerations WRT HPC. Yet they have *rooms* full of computers doing nothing, fully networked. (there's always lots of rooms of unused computers in places like these, I have found, because they basically keep upgrading to new hardware every year or two. Each summer, the hallways are nearly impassable due to stacks and stacks (not kidding) of computers to be thrown out or recycled). So I have convinced the faculty at this school that HPC is enough of a valuable study, even a strategic interest, that sharp kids like these really should be educated in the ins and outs of high performance computing. In general, HPC; in particular, our good friends, the Beowulf clusters. I would like to get real feedback from students, engineers and scientists on this list about this broad idea: is it useful to expose young engineer and scientists-to-be to HPC at the high school level, in generaly, but especially if these kids are on track to be the next generation of users of this tech? If so, what is a decent route to take when it comes to this as a HS level scholastic pursuit? So there you go, I have thrown out the first chip. Any takers to place a comment or two? Thanks in advance for your collective wisdom and help. H. Vidal, Jr. _______________________________________________ Beowulf mailing list, [email protected] To change your subscription (digest mode or unsubscribe) visit http://www.beowulf.org/mailman/listinfo/beowulf
