Preparing Students and Teachers for Large-Scale Cluster Computing

当前和未来的计算专业人员在毕业后进入劳动力大军时，对于支持网络规模数据密集型计算的软件应用程序的开发和维护方面的职业生涯准备不足，这一点日益引起人们的关注。大规模集群计算是对我国日益增长的高可用性、容错性、分散性和海量数据检索需求的回应。考虑到涉及到的工程和其他限制，计算机毕业生总是关心如何优化利用这些资源，因此，为他们做准备的学院和大学也是如此。这一领域需要工程和计算学科的交叉领域的专业知识。这个为期两天的大规模集群计算研讨会为本科教学机构提供了材料和课程支持。这个最初的研讨会将于2008年7月16日至18日举行，将邀请计算机科学和软件工程教授参加华盛顿大学的一个研讨会，此前曾在那里成功地举办过这样的课程。其目的是鼓励其他机构在课程中采用部分或全部课程材料和倡议，从而为更多的计算机毕业生在网络规模的数据密集型计算领域的职业生涯做好准备。这个研讨会的明确目标是接触到大量和多样化的计算教授群体，进而接触到他们的学生，增加大学毕业生能够进入网格和云计算等领域并能够在现在和整个职业生涯中尽可能快速和有效地做出贡献的可能性。我们期待这次研讨会能为今后类似的活动提供信息，以进一步增加影响。

There is a significant and growing concern that current and future computing professionals, as they enter the workforce upon graduation, are under-prepared for careers in the development and maintenance of software applications that support web-scale data intensive computing. Large scale cluster computing is a response to the increasing demands for high availability, fault tolerant, decentralized, and very large data retrieval needs in our country. Given the engineering and other constraints involved, optimal utilization of such resources will always be a concern for computing graduates, and thus for the colleges and universities that prepare them. This field requires expertise in a cross-section of engineering and computing disciplines.This 2.5 day workshop in large-scale cluster computing provides material and curricular support for undergraduate teaching institutions. This initial workshop, to be conducted July 16-18, 2008, will invite professors in computer science and software engineering to a workshop at the University of Washington, where such a course has previously been conducted successfully. The goal is to encourage other institutions to adopt some or all of the curricular materials and initiatives into their courses, thus preparing a greater number of computing graduates for careers in web-scale data intensive computing.The explicit goal of this workshop is to reach a large and diverse of group of computing professors, and in turn their students, to increase the likelihood that university graduates are able to step into their careers in such fields as grid and cloud computing and be able to contribute as quickly and effectively as possible now and throughout their careers. We expect this workshop to inform future similar events to further increase the impacts.