2012 Workshops

Computation has become essential to the practice of contemporary biology. The storage, access, analysis and visualization of growing amounts of data, and the functional interpretation of complex biological phenomena require the use of a range of computational approaches and tools. This series of workshops aims to provide an introductory overview of computational resources and methods that can be used with students interested in biology or the biological applications of math.

This workshop will cover various ways that computers can be used to enhance and expand the educational experience of students enrolled in the undergraduate chemistry curriculum. Discussions and hands-on laboratory exercises on visualization, simulation, molecular modeling, and mathematical software will be presented.

This workshop aims to expose participants to and inspire them with new techniques, teaching materials, and applications to use computational models in the undergraduate curriculum. By bringing faculty and teachers from different disciplines together so that they can learn how to incorporate computational models into their classrooms and research projects, it will advance the use of computing in undergraduate science education. We desire to have participants from a broad range of disciplines, including computer science, mathematics, and the physical and life sciences.

NCSI's Parallel and Cluster Computing workshops focus on teaching faculty how to move from traditional desktop computing to modern high-performance hardware. Offerings range from end-user focused applications ready-designed for HPC to the details of creating applications designed to run on clusters, many-core machines, shared-memory machines, and graphics processing units. The material is designed for undergraduate faculty from a variety of disciplines who would like to add parallel computing to their undergraduate teaching and research. In addition, undergraduate and graduate students are encouraged to attend alongside a sponsoring faculty member. The workshop is hands-on, with exercises in both computing and curriculum development.

NCSI's Kinder, Gentler Supercomputing workshops focus on teaching faculty skills and applications in supercomputing that cut across all disciplines, in particular visualization and computer science skills required for domain scientists to bring high performance computing into their lab and classroom. The workshop will cover visualization tools used for gridded and non-gridded data as well as biological and chemical structures, and users will get hands on experience using ParaView and VMD, as well as data analysis with R. Additionally, we will focus on computer skills required to run existing HPC applications on clusters, in particular configuring, compiling, and installing open source packages as well as the use of queueing systems to submit and manage HPC jobs on multi-user systems.Undergraduate and graduate students are encouraged to attend alongside a sponsoring faculty member.