Animated Graphics: Interpreting Solutions to Numerical Models on Supercomputers

Students in the Numerical Methods for Supercomputers course at Indiana University of Pennsylvania (IUP) used five DEC workstations to visualize the output of programs submitted to a Cray at the Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center (PSC). The DECstations were funded by National Science Foundation grant number USE-9151091 through their Instrumentation and Laboratory Improvement program.

The course was taught using the funded DECstation network for the first time in Spring 1992. Students had computer accounts on IUP's DECstations, IUP's Vax Cluster, the PSC's DECstations, the PSC's Vaxes, and the PSC's Cray YMP. Students used the DECstations' windowing, networking, and multitasking capabilities to freely work on several of these computers simultaneously.

In three of the students' assignments, they generated animated graphical output from their numerical results. In order to become familiar with the process, the first graphics assignment required only that the students run a program that the instructor had written to generate graphical output. In the second assignment students used numerical integration to simulate carbon diffusing through an iron rod and then they animated the diffusion process, with color representing concentration of carbon. In the third assignment, students numerically approximated the solution to the Poisson equation to model the temperature distribution in a rectangular steel plate. From the numerical temperature distribution, they created a color contour plot, with color representing temperature. Several of the students also animated the iterative scheme for solving the system of linear equations. All of the student animations were recorded on video tape at the PSC.

These experiences exposed students to the computing environment of scientific researchers. Many of the students subsequently entered graduate programs or industrial jobs in which they used high performance computing, scientific visualization, or networked workstation environments.

Course Supplements(in progress)

Publications:
1. "Workstations: Local Graphics and Remote Supercomputing", H. Edward Donley, Printout, Information Systems and Communications Center, Indiana University of PA, Spring 1992.
2. "Workstations: Local Graphics and Remote Supercomputing", H. Edward Donley, On-Cue, The Newsletter of the Consortium for Computing in Undergraduate Education, November, 1991.
3. "New Workstation Lab", H. Edward Donley, The Debugger, Computer Science Department, Indiana University of PA, Summer, 1991.

Presentations:
1. "Numerical Methods for Supercomputers", poster session at the DOE High Performance Computing Education Conference, Albuquerque, New Mexico, February 10-12, 1994.
2. "An Undergraduate Course on Numerical Methods for Supercomputers", Spring Meeting of the Allegheny Mountain Section of the Mathematical Association of America, April 16, 1993.
3. "Numerical Methods for Supercomputers", poster session on "Computer Laboratories in Mathematics Education", American Mathematical Society/Mathematical Association of America Join Meeting, San Antonio, Texas, January 18, 1993.
4. "Using Supercomputing in the Undergraduate Curriculum", keynote address to the EDP Council of the Pennsylvania State System of Higher Education, May 20, 1992.
5. "Using Supercomputers in a Numerical Analysis Course", student presentation by Jie Xu, Spring Meeting of the Allegheny Mountain Section of the Mathematical Association of America, April 11, 1992.

You may also be interested in some of the following teaching materials.

• The High Performance Scientific Computing course materials from the University of Colorado at Boulder.
• MetaCenter Education Programs.
• The Computational Science Education Project.
• The Center for Computational Science's interdisciplinary curriculum in massively parallel computing for undergraduates at Boston University.

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