Developing High Performance Computing Resources for Teaching Cluster and Grid Computing courses

High-Performance Computing (HPC) and the ability to process large amounts of data are of paramount importance for UK business and economy as outlined by Rt Hon David Willetts MP at the HPC and Big Data conference in February 2014. However there is a shortage of skills and available training in HPC to prepare and expand the workforce for the HPC and Big Data research and development. Currently, HPC skills are acquired mainly by students and staff taking part in HPC-related research projects, MSc courses, and at the dedicated training centres such as Edinburgh University’s EPCC. There are few UK universities teaching the HPC, Clusters and Grid Computing courses at the undergraduate level. To address the issue of skills shortages in the HPC it is essential to provide teaching and training as part of both postgraduate and undergraduate courses. The design and development of such courses is challenging since the technologies and software in the fields of large scale distributed systems such as Cluster, Cloud and Grid computing are undergoing continuous change. The students completing the HPC courses should be proficient in these evolving technologies and equipped with practical and theoretical skills for future jobs in this fast developing area. In this paper we present our experience in developing the HPC, Cluster and Grid modules including a review of existing HPC courses offered at the UK universities. The topics covered in the modules are described, as well as the coursework projects based on practical laboratory work. We conclude with an evaluation based on our experience over the last ten years in developing and delivering the HPC modules on the undergraduate courses, with suggestions for future work

TLAD 2010 Proceedings:8th international workshop on teaching, learning and assesment of databases (TLAD)

This is the eighth in the series of highly successful international workshops on the Teaching, Learning and Assessment of Databases (TLAD 2010), which once again is held as a workshop of BNCOD 2010 - the 27th International Information Systems Conference. TLAD 2010 is held on the 28th June at the beautiful Dudhope Castle at the Abertay University, just before BNCOD, and hopes to be just as successful as its predecessors.The teaching of databases is central to all Computing Science, Software Engineering, Information Systems and Information Technology courses, and this year, the workshop aims to continue the tradition of bringing together both database teachers and researchers, in order to share good learning, teaching and assessment practice and experience, and further the growing community amongst database academics. As well as attracting academics from the UK community, the workshop has also been successful in attracting academics from the wider international community, through serving on the programme committee, and attending and presenting papers.This year, the workshop includes an invited talk given by Richard Cooper (of the University of Glasgow) who will present a discussion and some results from the Database Disciplinary Commons which was held in the UK over the academic year. Due to the healthy number of high quality submissions this year, the workshop will also present seven peer reviewed papers, and six refereed poster papers. Of the seven presented papers, three will be presented as full papers and four as short papers. These papers and posters cover a number of themes, including: approaches to teaching databases, e.g. group centered and problem based learning; use of novel case studies, e.g. forensics and XML data; techniques and approaches for improving teaching and student learning processes; assessment techniques, e.g. peer review; methods for improving students abilities to develop database queries and develop E-R diagrams; and e-learning platforms for supporting teaching and learning

TLAD 2010 Proceedings:8th international workshop on teaching, learning and assesment of databases (TLAD)

This is the eighth in the series of highly successful international workshops on the Teaching, Learning and Assessment of Databases (TLAD 2010), which once again is held as a workshop of BNCOD 2010 - the 27th International Information Systems Conference. TLAD 2010 is held on the 28th June at the beautiful Dudhope Castle at the Abertay University, just before BNCOD, and hopes to be just as successful as its predecessors.The teaching of databases is central to all Computing Science, Software Engineering, Information Systems and Information Technology courses, and this year, the workshop aims to continue the tradition of bringing together both database teachers and researchers, in order to share good learning, teaching and assessment practice and experience, and further the growing community amongst database academics. As well as attracting academics from the UK community, the workshop has also been successful in attracting academics from the wider international community, through serving on the programme committee, and attending and presenting papers.This year, the workshop includes an invited talk given by Richard Cooper (of the University of Glasgow) who will present a discussion and some results from the Database Disciplinary Commons which was held in the UK over the academic year. Due to the healthy number of high quality submissions this year, the workshop will also present seven peer reviewed papers, and six refereed poster papers. Of the seven presented papers, three will be presented as full papers and four as short papers. These papers and posters cover a number of themes, including: approaches to teaching databases, e.g. group centered and problem based learning; use of novel case studies, e.g. forensics and XML data; techniques and approaches for improving teaching and student learning processes; assessment techniques, e.g. peer review; methods for improving students abilities to develop database queries and develop E-R diagrams; and e-learning platforms for supporting teaching and learning

Validating Intelligent Power and Energy Systems { A Discussion of Educational Needs

Traditional power systems education and training is flanked by the demand for coping with the rising complexity of energy systems, like the integration of renewable and distributed generation, communication, control and information technology. A broad understanding of these topics by the current/future researchers and engineers is becoming more and more necessary. This paper identifies educational and training needs addressing the higher complexity of intelligent energy systems. Education needs and requirements are discussed, such as the development of systems-oriented skills and cross-disciplinary learning. Education and training possibilities and necessary tools are described focusing on classroom but also on laboratory-based learning methods. In this context, experiences of using notebooks, co-simulation approaches, hardware-in-the-loop methods and remote labs experiments are discussed.Comment: 8th International Conference on Industrial Applications of Holonic and Multi-Agent Systems (HoloMAS 2017

Paper Abstracts (2015)

Twentieth Conference of the Association of Christians in the Mathematical Science

Reengineering Biomedical Engineering Curricula: A New Product Development Approach

Product development engineers in medical industries have created design control procedures to ensure high quality designs that are as error-free as possible. The reason is simple; companies must adhere to certain engineering and manufacturing best practices in order to obtain certification of their devices for sale in the US and abroad. We describe here an ongoing effort to apply these industrial best practices to the design and implementation of a novel sequence of undergraduate biomedical computing courses within the Department of Bio-medical Engineering at Marquette University (Milwaukee, Wisconsin). We have tightly integrated our industrial advisory board into this design and development effort. The board has contributed to significantly to the orderly generation of curricular requirements, the development of course implementation designs and the evaluation of these designs per requirements

Introducing Cloud Computing Topics in Curricula

The demand for graduates with exposure in Cloud Computing is on the rise. For many educational institutions, the challenge is to decide on how to incorporate appropriate cloud-based technologies into their curricula. In this paper, we describe our design and experiences of integrating Cloud Computing components into seven third/fourth-year undergraduate-level information system, computer science, and general science courses that are related to large-scale data processing and analysis at the University of Queensland, Australia. For each course, we aimed at finding the best-available and cost-effective cloud technologies that fit well in the existing curriculum. The cloud related technologies discussed in this paper include open-source distributed computing tools such as Hadoop, Mahout, and Hive, as well as cloud services such as Windows Azure and Amazon Elastic Computing Cloud (EC2). We anticipate that our experiences will prove useful and of interest to fellow academics wanting to introduce Cloud Computing modules to existing courses

Preparing millennials as digital citizens and socially and environmentally responsible business professionals in a socially irresponsible climate

As of 2015, a millennial born in the 1990's became the largest population in the workplace and are still growing. Studies indicate that a millennial is tech savvy but lag in the exercise of digital responsibility. In addition, they are passive towards environmental sustainability and fail to grasp the importance of social responsibility. This paper provides a review of such findings relating to business communications educators in their classrooms. The literature should enable the development of a millennial as an excellent global citizen through business communications curricula that emphasizes digital citizenship, environmental sustainability and social responsibility. The impetus for this work is to provide guidance in the development of courses and teaching strategies customized to the development of each millennial as a digital, environmental and socially responsible global citizen

Proceedings of the International Workshop on EuroPLOT Persuasive Technology for Learning, Education and Teaching (IWEPLET 2013)

"This book contains the proceedings of the International Workshop on EuroPLOT Persuasive Technology for Learning, Education and Teaching (IWEPLET) 2013 which was held on 16.-17.September 2013 in Paphos (Cyprus) in conjunction with the EC-TEL conference. The workshop and hence the proceedings are divided in two parts: on Day 1 the EuroPLOT project and its results are introduced, with papers about the specific case studies and their evaluation. On Day 2, peer-reviewed papers are presented which address specific topics and issues going beyond the EuroPLOT scope. This workshop is one of the deliverables (D 2.6) of the EuroPLOT project, which has been funded from November 2010 – October 2013 by the Education, Audiovisual and Culture Executive Agency (EACEA) of the European Commission through the Lifelong Learning Programme (LLL) by grant #511633. The purpose of this project was to develop and evaluate Persuasive Learning Objects and Technologies (PLOTS), based on ideas of BJ Fogg. The purpose of this workshop is to summarize the findings obtained during this project and disseminate them to an interested audience. Furthermore, it shall foster discussions about the future of persuasive technology and design in the context of learning, education and teaching. The international community working in this area of research is relatively small. Nevertheless, we have received a number of high-quality submissions which went through a peer-review process before being selected for presentation and publication. We hope that the information found in this book is useful to the reader and that more interest in this novel approach of persuasive design for teaching/education/learning is stimulated. We are very grateful to the organisers of EC-TEL 2013 for allowing to host IWEPLET 2013 within their organisational facilities which helped us a lot in preparing this event. I am also very grateful to everyone in the EuroPLOT team for collaborating so effectively in these three years towards creating excellent outputs, and for being such a nice group with a very positive spirit also beyond work. And finally I would like to thank the EACEA for providing the financial resources for the EuroPLOT project and for being very helpful when needed. This funding made it possible to organise the IWEPLET workshop without charging a fee from the participants.