[hpc-announce] CDER Center: Grant and training opportunity for instructors to add parallel and distributed computing to early courses

[Alan Sussman]

Greetings from the CDER Center,

We have an opportunity we are offering to help instructors incorporate 
parallel and distributed computing (PDC) into lower division 
undergraduate courses.

Through an NSF CyberTraining grant, we are able to offer grants to 
support instructors in PDC curriculum development work. Although our 
nearly 150 prior grants were quite successful, this time we are hoping 
to do even more by doubling the amount of each award (to $5000), and 
coupling it with training during the week of August 5, 2019 that will 
cover both course content and the evaluation methodology needed to 
enable publication of findings from experimental course offerings.

The program will support 20 grants this year, and there is also funding 
for another 10 people to just attend the training. We also anticipate 
supporting travel to our EduPar and EduHPC workshops to present results.

In addition to asking you to think about applying for a grant, we are 
asking for your help to publicize the grants. Please forward this 
invitation to anyone you know who teaches courses in the first two years 
of the curriculum.

More information about the grants and the workshop can be found at 
https://grid.cs.gsu.edu/~tcpp/curriculum/?q=node/21620 .

The application deadline is April 1, and notification will be April 15. 
Applications are brief and simple, and are submitted via EasyChair.

As you know, modern systems nearly all employ PDC. Our effort has been 
directed toward modernizing the curriculum to treat PDC as a fundamental 
aspect of computational thinking. We hope that this new program will 
help many departments take new steps toward this goal.

The CDER Center Team
Chip Weems, U. Massachusetts
Alan Sussman, U. Maryland
Arny Rosenberg, U. Massachusetts
Anshul Gupta, IBM
Martina Barnas, Indiana U.
Ramachandran Vaidyanathan, Louisiana State U.