Grid Computing Courses

Ideally we would describe each course in the same terms, to include duration, credits, target audience, topics taught, etc. If people involved in each course could update their own sections that would be really helpful.

University Post-Graduate Courses

Grid Computing course at the University of Alabama

Puri Bangalore is an assistant professor of Computer Science at the University of Alabama and has been running this course since 2004. The course covers essentials & principles of distributed computing and parallel computing, though the students are expected to have already studied these topics in other courses. The Grid topics covered include:

• History of grid
• Security
• Informantion Management
• Data Grid
• Workflows
• Web Services
• Grid Services

The students have projects on each topic and are required to write simple programs in Java. 30 students took the course in 2004, 20 in 2005 and 10 in 2006. Next year the Grid course is to be merged with a Distributed Computing course which would make more students eligible to take the course.

There are two 35 minute lectures per week with 17 - 18 weeks per semester The students complete three or four assigments and have two exams.

GGUS support courses

Torsten Antoni is involved in running GGUS, the helpdesk system for EGEE user support. They offer monthly one day courses in using GGUS to support staff, this may move to every 2nd month in future. The training is targetted at EGEE members, GOC staff or middleware developers, not just university students. Generally EGEE support is not their main duty and most need help to do it.

The courses are run face-to-face not remote although the idea of filming courses and offering the material on egee website has been discussed. There are both lectures then hands-on training using a test system.

TeraGrid internships Teragrid organises summer internships for undergraduates rather than running specific grid courses. These generally last 3 months although some students have stayed on subsequently while continuing their study. The internships are targetted at particularly strong students. The scheme was first run in 2004 with three students. One of these is still with them and very enthusiastic! Because they are targetting undergrads TeraGrid find that they have to talk about the relevance of Grid technology in simple terms giving the students the vision of grids as the future, describing the technology and invite them to come and try it out for themselves.

OGSA-DAI user training

OGSA-DAI have provided training at summerschools and workshops at GGF events rather than running dedicated OGSA-DAI training events.

EPCC MSc

The Edinburgh Parallel Computing Centre runs an MSc. course in high performance computing which covers some Grid material. There are two lectures per week, including practicals for 6 weeks. There is a similar module in MSc. in eScience - distributed computing course.

These modules have about 80 hours of teaching time and earn 3 course credits.

University of Vienna

Peter Brezany is involved in the University of Vienna's MSc course. There are 4 modules spread over 2 semesters with 3-5 hours of teaching a week. There are usually about 15-20 students. The course includes lectures, practicals and project work and covers topics such as OGSA-DAI.

GridKA Summerschool

Torsten Antoni is involved in the GridKA summerschool which usually has about 90 -100 students. GridKA targets HEP and other communities and covers grid middlewares including gLIte, GT4, unicore. lectures, practicals. There are two streams an installation stream and an application stream.

EPIC

Stephanie McLean told us about recent work done by EPIC in the US. In the last 18 months they've gathered people around US to discuss ways to try to use cyberinfrastrucuter to enhance learning, focussing on development of curriculum, online training, use of access grid for education and training especially for bringing together specific groups, minorities, women, etc.

University of Texas runs a course on HPC and they (in conjunction with EPIC?) are going to package that course and make it available to other universities. The ultimate goal is to move towards cross-campus courses delivered over the Access Grid.

A virtual community has been formed via epic and now they are looking at how to do distributed training. There have already been a series of workshops looking at access grids underrepresented communities, etc.

EPIC is involved in the Humanities, Arts, Science and Technology Advanced Collaboratory (HASTAC (pronounced Haystack)) group which aims to use cyberinfrastructure for distributed research in these areas. They are looking at doing more online training, more f2f workshops, using technology to reach more rural areas, more international audiences, etc.

Since previous meetings the EPIC grant has come to an end so EPIC may change somewhat going forward, but virtual institutes will probably continue - minority serving institutions, etc. as there is a strong commitment to this going forward using access grid, etc.

Seoul National University

Junseok Hwang is involved in Grid training in Seoul National University where they practical training for the grid business association in Korea and provide education services for potential users and application developers

There is one full-day seminar twice a year with the last in May 2006. The next is expected to take place in December colocated with Grid Asia project. They are hoping to organise some international collaboration before then and share training activities

At Seoul National University itself the computer engineering dept has a postgraduate course in internet computing which is a 14 week course with 8 weeks covering Grid technologies.

The College of Engineering is looking at providing access grid education and will try to encourage other departments to participate They have a t-infrastructure mostly based on Access Grid, input on what other people are doing for their training can feed into what the College of Engineering is doing.

gLite hands on training at International ICFA Workshop on Grid Activities within Large Scale International Collaborations

this course is a 3 hours hands on training on gLite held on resources of the German D-Grid project at Forschungszentrum Karlsruhe by Kilian Schwarz. The course materials are to be found (see attachment).

University of Manchester

John Brooke and Donal Fellows have been running a module on Grid Computing and eScience every year since 2004 for the MSc courses (overall course structure means that there are many courses that can include the module) in the School of Computer Science. The module uses Unicore for the practical sessions, and focusses on trying to provide both CS and Software Engineering perspectives on the Grid, and includes a mini-project (subject chosen from a short list) for students to carry out in small groups over 2-3 weeks.

This year's mini-project topics are:

• Security
• Tooling
• Adapting Applications to the Grid
• Generic Interfaces to the Grid
• New Service Stacks

Summer Schools

CERN summer school of computing

The CERN summer school of computing is now 36 years old. It focuses on high energy physics and how computing is used in HEP. The computing techniques taught include grids. This is a two week school and approximately half of it is grid-related. Topics covered include X509, security, etc. and classes consist of lectures as well as practical hands-on sessions on using Grid infrastrucure and how to write own GT4 grid services. Usually there are about 200 applicants and out of this 80 students are selected.

Online Courses

webbased programming tutorial for Globus Toolkit Borja Sotomayor was involved with the Madrid summerschool which was a 4 week intensive course in July (Note: is this an ongoing thing or a once-off? I can't find references to it online!) The summerschool has approx 100 hours of teaching- 5 hours a day and it tries to cover most aspects of grid computing: service programming, how to set up grid, how to manage VOs, resource mgt, etc. Different teachers teach blocks of the course and there are also invited speakers to give short lectures.

Borja has also been involved in shorter workshops on a particular topic, typically 4 hour workshops.

Borja maintains a webbased Globus Toolkit tutorial.

Attachments:

gLite-Training2.pdf [ExistingCourses/gLite-Training2.pdf]