Engineering education for a zero growth economy

Engineering as a profession and its educational system grew up in parallel with the development of agrarian capitalism, industrial capitalism and finance capitalism. Engineering has participated heavily in the development and growth of fossil fuels both for materials production and as an energy source; land, sea and air transportation systems; manufacturing; communications; computing; the built environment and many others. Engineering has contributed to non-renewable resource extraction and materials innovations as well as developments in the rise and growth of mass industrialization. Now society faces the need for major changes if society is to survive the existential threats it is facing such as biophysical environment degradation, climate changes, health pandemics, and over population. All of these threats are a result of the economics of unlimited growth which is no longer tenable. How will these unknown threats and challenges affect the engineering profession and in particular engineering education? In this paper we will take a brief view of possible impacts to engineering education for the built environment as it could be affected in a zero growth economy. We hope that this paper will inspire and lead others to inspect other disciplines within engineering education for changes and innovations that a sustainable future may require

The effect of adding a scalar D-cache to the Cray-4 vector processor

In the past, vector supercomputers achieved high performance with long arithmetic pipelines coupled with fast scalar processors. Processor speed has increased at a rate greater than memory speed. Indeed, current vector processors have cycle times far faster than the memories they are connected to. When compilers can predict memory access patterns, they vectorize computations and thereby hide the processor/memory disparity. When memory access patterns are not known until run-time, caches can pay large dividends. This paper studies the effects of adding a scalar data cache to a modern vector processor and shows some encouraging results. 1 Introduction As computer design has matured, processor speed has increased at a rate greater than that of general-purpose memory. This disparity is quite obvious as modern vector processors now have instruction cycle times of 1 nanosecond -- substantially shorter than main memory access times. This disparity has led to memory banking, which helps vecto..

What do sustaining life and sustainable engineering have in common?

Medical Education professionals in the U.S. have realized that medical education now consists of three main features: diagnosis, cure and in the case of chronic illness, health management (sustaining life). In a similar way, engineering education may be characterized by problem definition (diagnosis), problem solving and in the case of chronic engineering problems, problem management. Medical education has taken steps to modify its curriculum and pedagogy to reflect this new awareness whereas engineering education has not. What can engineering education learn from the medical education community? And, in particular, how do further challenges of sustainable engineering impact how engineering education should change?Non UBCUnreviewedFacultyOthe