High-Performance Computing and Engineering Educational Development and Practice

This Innovate Practice Full Paper presents HPC and engineering educational development and practice. Educators and researchers are witnessing the emergence of parallel and high-performance computing (HPC) in many computing and engineering environments worldwide. Single-core processing is slowly becoming obsolete while parallel solutions to application development are now replacing serial solutions to achieve higher performance, particularly in many scientific, engineering, and computing fields. Some universities or research institutes worldwide have developed and have become centers of supercomputing. Most of these centers, particularly the world acclaimed Tianhe-2 supercomputer developed by China's National University of Defense Technology (NUDT), often have their own HPC educational approaches as well as their own curricula at both undergraduate and graduate levels. This paper presents some high-level HPC educational concepts, educational framework designs, and strategies for cultivating HPC talented graduates. In this work, the authors show unique perspectives and practical experiences on student capability, oriented toward HPC curricular development. They also show a step-by-step practical system in which real platform, real application, and research-teaching integration modes can immerse students into an HPC world for better understanding. The authors show how researchers with rich computing and engineering experience can become deeply involved in course design, in-class teaching, and in laboratory instruction. They also discuss the effectiveness of HPC courses at the NUDT and they show how HPC can become a stable element in computing and engineering education.