A Curriculum for Petascale Computing

A group of faculty at Purdue is working to develop a curriculum for high performance computing and cyberinfrastructure [1]. Current curriculum efforts are focused on developing and delivering university courses in bioinformatics systems development, grid computing and cyberinfrastructure, algorithms, biomedical informatics, high performance computing systems, and scientific and information visualization. While this effort will address current needs for high performance computing and visualization, the recent development of petascale computing which we define as petaflops of computation attached to petabytes of storage and high speed networks – will require a cohort of highly skilled developers, systems administrators, and science gateway experts who will need training and experience beyond the level available today. Petascale computing represents a new frontier in supercomputing with significant engineering, technology computer science, visualization, and software engineering challenges that must be overcome. In this paper, we propose an enhanced petascale curriculum to address the petascale challenge.