Taking full advantage of the opportunities that follow from petascale computing systems like Blue Waters requires a long-term, national-scale, coordinated effort to educate and train the next generation of computational researchers. The Blue Waters education efforts focus on exciting, recruiting, educating, and retaining professionals and students to prepare current and future generations of scientists, technologists, engineers and mathematicians to advance scientific discovery, invention, and innovation.
Petascale computing is more complex than previous computing paradigms and requires that new approaches to scientific computing be pursued. Preparation for petascale computing requires a solid grounding in computational science and engineering (CSE), especially high-performance computing (HPC) and HPC-related curricula, and the needed curricula are still evolving. No single institution has the expertise and experience needed to fully exploit this extraordinary capability.
The Blue Waters educational initiatives are addressing computational science and engineering education with an emphasis on HPC and petascale computing at the undergraduate, graduate, and postgraduate levels, and beyond. Graduate and post-graduate education efforts are led by the Virtual School of Computational Science and Engineering while the Shodor Education Foundation focuses on undergraduate education.
The Great Lakes Consortium for Petascale Computation (GLCPC) facilitates the widespread and effective use of petascale computing to address frontier research questions in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics at research, educational, and industrial organizations across the United States. The National Center for Supercomputing Applications, on behalf of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, is the lead institution for organizing and managing the GLCPC. © 2009 Board of Trustees University of Illinois.