Collaborative Research: Enhancing Teaching of Grid Computing to Undergraduate Students by using a Workflow Editor

计算机科学(31)网格计算将地理上分布的计算资源结合起来，进行高性能计算；它特别适合于协作性、跨学科和实验性的项目。为了利用网格计算的强大功能，用户通常需要管理低级别的基础设施细节，并使用非直观的命令行执行来运行程序。这个项目是为了满足在网格计算社区中使编程接口更易于使用的需求，尤其是对于成为下一代专业用户的本科生。特别是，这个项目正在探索使用最近引入的网格计算工作流编辑器来教授分布式计算和使用网格计算资源。工作流编辑器为用户提供图形界面，使分布式计算能够在不需要低级编程或命令行交互的情况下构建和执行。工作流编辑器被认为对网格计算的成功做出了贡献，它允许不同学科的科学家使用很少或根本没有编程经验的网格计算资源来创建解决方案。该项目的主要研究人员具有广泛的经验，并在网格计算方面发表了大量文章。在这个项目中编写的材料正在两个主要合作机构进行评估，这两个机构正在编写材料并在当地和集体进行测试，另一个机构正在更多样化的教育环境中评估编写的材料，并由一名独立的专业教育评估员进行评估。这些材料部分通过全州范围的电视网络分发，该网络将覆盖16所州立大学。

Computer Science (31)Grid computing combines geographically distributed computation resources to carry out high performance computing; it is particularly suitable for collaborative, interdisciplinary, and experimental projects. To take advantage of the power of grid computing, users have typically been required to manage low-level infrastructure details and to run programs using non-intuitive command-line execution. This project is responding to the need to make the programming interfaces easier to use in the grid computing community generally, but especially for undergraduate students who become the next generation of professional users. In particular, this project is exploring the use of a recently introduced grid-computing workflow editor for teaching distributed computing and for using grid computing resources.Workflow editors provide graphical interfaces for users and enable distributed computations to be constructed and executed without the need for low level programming or command-line interaction. Workflow editors are seen to contribute to the success of grid computing by allowing scientists of varying disciplines to create solutions to their problems using the resources of grid computing with little or no programming experience.The Principal Investigators in this project have broad experience and have published widely in grid computing. The materials developed in this project are being assessed at the two primary collaborating institutions that are developing the materials and testing them locally and collectively, at one additional institution that is evaluating the developed materials in a more diverse educational setting, and by an independent professional educational evaluator. The materials are being distributed in part through a statewide televideo network that will reach sixteen state universities.