Sites participating in the Fall 2005 Grid Computing course. Red dots
indicate participating UNC campuses; purple dots, private institutions.
Image Courtesy Barry Wilkinson |
Grid computing is all about bringing together distributed resources,
data and people, so it's fitting that one of the first undergraduate
courses in grid computing would also be distributed. Since fall
semester 2004, 75 students across North Carolina have learned about
grid computing with the help of faculty from several institutions and
the North Carolina Research and Education Network.
"This course brings state of the art computing into the
undergraduate curriculum," said Barry Wilkinson from the University of
North Carolina at Charlotte. "In this class the NCREN wasn't just used
to transmit lectures; it was also used to create a grid infrastructure
for the students."
Wilkinson, along with UNC Wilmington faculty member Clayton
Ferner and a team of six faculty and students, led development for the
course, which is funded by the UNC Office of the President and the
National Science Foundation. Students learn about grids from the bottom
up, studying technology first and applications later. Lectures are
transmitted from UNC Charlotte to 12 institutions, and students
complete a series of five assignments to learn how to set up and use a
grid.
"We start them off with an assignment in Web services, next
they generate a grid service and contact it, then they submit jobs to
the Globus Resource Allocation Manager (GRAM), use a scheduler and a
workflow editor," explained Ferner. "The goal is to train students who
will one day support or implement research on grids."
Wilkinson and Ferner found developing the new course a
challenge. The summer of 2004 was spent setting up the first class grid
based on Globus Toolkit 3.2, developing the lengthy course assignments,
and creating hundreds of PowerPoint slides from which to lecture. This
past summer was spent updating the grid and assignments to GT4. They
also integrated some of their own grid research into the curriculum,
using the GridNexus workflow editor developed at UNC Wilmington.
"This is not a course regularly taught at any level," said
Wilkinson. "There was no textbook to follow, and so we've created all
the material from scratch. The class has been an enabler for the
students—several of the students from 2004 and 2005 have continued on
in grid research after the end of class."
Learn more at the course Web site.
—Katie Yurkewicz
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