Improving American Competitiveness through Workforce Education in Cyberinfrastructure Applications

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A Council on Competitiveness 2004 survey indicates that 97% of major companies could not function without high performance computing and computational science. Computational science and the use of modeling and simulation have been cited by the President's Information Technology Advisory Committee and the National Science Foundation Blue Ribbon Panel on Simulation Based Engineering Science as key to continued US leadership in science and engineering. By way of this project, the Ohio Supercomputer Center (OSC), The Ohio State University, the University of Akron, and the Ohio Learning Network (OLN) will collaborate with a consortium of Ohio universities to provide education on computational modeling and simulation and programs that enable small and medium-sized companies to access supercomputers and computational science expertise. Building off existing work, the PI's will integrate the ongoing undergraduate minor programs in computational science into two-year college programs and first certificate programs for workforce training; to add more advanced, industry-driven computational science certificates to serve major groups of industry collaborators; and, to tie the advanced certificates to an emerging Masters program in engineering. Parallel to the development of the certificate programs, the PI's will adapt and create science/engineering portals that give businesses access to the cyber-infrastructure resources they need to make themselves more competitive in the global marketplace. The project's proposed Cyber-infrastructure Workforce Training and Implementation Program represents the first formalized effort for universities to help companies train internal talent to use computational tools and techniques to drive business competitiveness. The focus is on polymer science and the project will be in conjunction with the Blue Collar Computing initiative/program as a mechanism for removing barriers to CI adoption