Intel-letter

Dr. Stephen Wheat, Director
HPC Platform Office
Intel, USA

Dr. Henry Neeman suggested that we write and describe our work in computational science education and our near-term needs. He thought there might be synergy between our goals and Intel's. We teach parallel and distributed programming workshops for the National Computational Science Institute (http://www.computationalscience.org). Recently we have been tasked by the SuperComputing conference series to design and implement the education program for the SC07-SC09 conferences.

As you know the overwhelming majority of HPC resources are dedicated to research rather than education. This situation has put our group in a position where we spend a significant portion of our time designing and implementing software and hardware solutions to support teaching parallel and distributed programming and computational science. The Bootable Cluster CD (http://bccd.cs.uni.edu) and Little-Fe (http://cluster.earlham.edu/projects.html) are two manifestations of our work. The BCCD is a live CD that transforms an x86 or PowerPC based lab into an ad-hoc computational cluster. Little-Fe is an inexpensive, portable, 4-8 node computational cluster.

In order to support computational science curriculum development and delivery we are gearing-up to build a number of Little-Fe units, approximately 20, for use by science faculty across the country. These faculty members, working with their undergraduate student researchers, will develop curriculum modules and deliver workshops and presentations in a variety of venues. The curriculum and workshops are preperatory activities for the education program we are implementing for SC07-SC09.

The principle cost component of the Little-Fe design is the motherboard. Our design is based on small form-factor motherboards, such as the Intel D945GPMLKR Media Series boards. We wonder if Intel might be interested in either donating a number of these boards or permitting us to purchase them at a discount? In exchange we could provide you with appropriate credit on both the physical units and in our articles about of the project.

Thank-you for your time.

Paul Gray
David Joiner
Thomas Murphy
Charles Peck