Grid Education and Communication

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Grid Education and Communication
Soma Mukherjee Center
for Gravitational Wave Astronomy
Department of Physics and Astronomy
University of Texas at Brownsville
OSG Consortium meeting, Milwaukee, July 20-22,
2005
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Who are we ?
UTB, situated on the Mexican border, is an MSI
with gt90 students of Hispanic origin. Masters
program, Ph.D. program in collaboration with
UT-Dallas. The CGWA is NASA funded Center for
doing research on gravitational wave detection.
Main areas of interest are LIGO/ LISA data
analysis (2 faculty members, 2 post-docs, 2
graduate students) Astrophysics (1 faculty
member, 1 post-doc and 1 undergraduate
student) Numerical Relativity (3 faculty members,
4 post-docs, 4 graduate students) Physics
education (1 faculty member, several staff
members). CGWA director Mario Diaz is committed
to Education.
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UTB and Grid EO a brief history of the
evolution of Grid Summer Workshop

• 2000 GriPhyN EO Romano and Anderson lead the
  effort. Lobizon cluster built.
• 2001 New faculty line opened Manuela Campanelli
  hired to do Grid EO
• iVDGL EO funds come to UTB. Several
  undergraduate students hired to
• install condor, globus and VDT on the
  cluster. Postdoctoral researchers
• hired to do LISA template calculation
  on the cluster using these facilities.
• -2002 Workshop organized to train some 5
  students from Salish Kootenai College
• on how to install VDT. Undergraduate
  students from UTB were sent to
• Grid meetings.
• -2003 continuation of the above efforts. Funes
  cluster built for Numerical Relativity
• research with partial funds from
  iVDGL.
• -2004 SM begins UTB Grid EO supervision. First
  Grid Summer Workshop
• (supported by NSF) at South Padre
  Island first of its kind in U.S.
• -2005 NSF funded Grid Summer Workshop 2005 last
  week !

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Grid Summer Workshop June 21-25, 2004 Aim

• The aim of this week long intensive program is
• To give students a basic foundation in
  distributed computing.
• Valuable hands-on training in computing
  techniques.
• To introduce essential skills that students in
  natural and applied
• sciences, engineering and computer science need
  to conduct and
• support scientific analysis in the emerging
  grid computing
• environment.
• To provide motivation to young undergraduate
  students.
• To help build up interdisciplinary
  collaborations.
• To build up a task force for future e-science.

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Grid Summer Workshop June 21-15 2004 Venue
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Grid Summer Workshop 2004 People
Funds NSF (Grant 0437628, 25K, PI
SM), CGWA (17K)
Overall organization SM
Collaboration UTB, GriPhyN, iVDGL, GRIDS, LSU
Lecturers and Developers Mike Wilde (Curriculum
Director, ANL) Jamie Frey (UW Madison) Gabrielle
Allen (LSU) Charles Bacon (ANL) Jorge Rodriguez
(UF Gainesville) Pradeep Padala (U Michigan) Jens
Voeckler (U Chicago) Alain Roy (UW Madison)
Systems support Charlie Torres (UTB) Ariel
Martinez (UTB) Jose Zamora (UTB) Scott Gose
(ANL) Alan Farrell (UTB) Tony Loken (UTB) Fitra
Khan (UTB)
Teaching Assistants Rob Quick (IU) Andrew Zahn
(U Chicago) Sean Morris (UTB) Jose Zamora (UTB)
Local support Martha Casquette and Danuta
Mogilska
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Grid Summer Workshop 2004 Students and class
format
36 students from 19 universities including 4
international students from Brazil, Canada,
Mexico and Russia. Diverse backgrounds. 4
Minority Serving Institutions. 12 students
belonging to minority groups. 10 women.
Instructors
Teaching Assistants
Students worked in teams consisting of one CS and
one non-CS member such that there was some
equilibrium between the teams.
Student Teams
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Grid Summer Workshop 2004Publicity and media
coverage
Publicity Poster sent to more than 50
universities in U.S. Announcements sent to LSC,
GriPhyN, iVDGL, APS and several other mailing
lists.
Media coverage Local television channel covered
the event. (News clip included)
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Grid Summer Workshop 2004Achievements
Compilation of workshop course material
at http//www.mcs.anl.gov/wilde/summer-grid Expo
sure and broad overview of distributed computing
to young scientists embarking on data analysis
in various fields. Training students from MSI s.
Providing exposure to local students gt90 of
whom are of Hispanic origin. Dissemination of
distributed computing knowledge to students
from diverse backgrounds to develop
interdisciplinary collaborations in the future.
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GSW 2004 Photos
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Grid Summer Workshop 2005July 11-15
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Grid Summer Workshop 2005 Sponsors and
Collaborators
Funds NSF 42 K ( PI SM) Paul Avery 10
K Collaborators GriPhyN, iVDGL, GRIDS, LSU,
NCSA LSU provided 26 laptops for hands-on use at
the workshop.

Systems support Ariel Martinez (
Lead, UTB) Jose Zamora (UTB) Charlie Torres
(UTB) Patrick Duda (NCSA)
Teaching Assistants Jed Dobson (Dartmouth) Rob
Quick (IU) Laukik Chitnis (UF) Ravi Madduri
(FNAL) Dylan Stark (LSU) Archit Kulshrestha (LSU)
Instructors and developers Mike Wilde
(Curriculum Director, ANL, U Chicago) Jamie Frey
(UW Madison) Gabrielle Allen (LSU) Ravi Madduri
(ANL) Jorge Rodriguez (UF Gainesville) David
Gehrig (NCSA)
Local support Martha Casquette Danka
Mogilska Michael Hinojosa
Observers Mary Trauner (GA Tech) Katie Yukrewicz
(FNAL)
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Grid Summer Workshop 2005 Students and class
format
42 students from 23 universities including 6
international students from Argentina, Brazil and
India. 4 Minority Serving Institutions. 16
students belonging to minority groups. 10 women.
Increased participation from UTB.
Instructors
Teaching Assistants
Students worked in teams consisting of one CS and
one non-CS member such that there was some
equilibrium between the teams. Team members
learn from each other.
Student Teams
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Grid Summer Workshop 2005Publication

• Katie Yukrewicz (FNAL communications) will be
  publishing an
• article in a future issue of Science Grid This
  Week.
• UTB Online journal article.
• Local newspaper article in the pipeline.
• Organizers and participants to submit paper for
  journal publication.
• Mary Trauner (GATech) intends to use the course
  material for the
• Grid Cookbook project.
• Lecture contents used as regular classroom
  material at Fermi Lab.

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Grid Summer Workshop 2005Photos
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2004 to 2005 Whats new ?
36
Students
42
19
Institution
23
2 observers
Observation
Collaboration
NCSA
4
TA s
7
26 laptops from Ed Seidel and Gabrielle Allen,
CCT, LSU More hands-on material. Added open end
discussion session
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What have we learnt ?

• Things that worked
• Implementation of student team model.
• Working with TAs (approximately 1 TA every 6
  students) led to
• serious interaction and successful completion
  of exercises.
• Discussion break helped evaluate student progress
  and to do some
• leveling.
• Things that can be improved
• Simplify networking needs to for greater
  stability.
• Use more applications in exercises, and link
  them
• Improve some logistics ( meals, transportation )

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Future direction - I

•   More groups and more application
  specific programs ?
•   Material packaging and portability.
•   Evolve contents as we bring in new groups.
•   Working scientist and researchers involved
  ?
•   Improve syllabus with new content.
•   Permanent set of people thinking about
  contents ?
•   Prepare 2 levels of exercise main
  exercise (if network
• fails) and fall back exercise option ?
• -         

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Future direction - II

• Development of Grid Education facility
  (including private wireless) that
• travels around the country.
•      Dedicated people to handle content
  packaging and local organization.
•     Take some selected students to give active
  feedback on course material
• i.e. involve them in active exercise
  development process.
•      Modularize the content feeding into
  length and focus of program.
•      Exercises pre-packaged and turned into
  web pages ?
• -         

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Future direction - III

•        
• Introduction of online analysis ?
• Use student certificates to do exercise/analysis
  the next day.
• Development of OSG Education VO ? VO needs to
  provide frontline
• support to its users. We could use some of this
  program material to
• accomplish this job.
• Help small schools with no e-resource.
• Create future generation of scientists running
  e-science.
• OSG science fair ?

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Where do we want to go from here ?
The workshop drew a large number of interested
undergraduate and graduate students. Minority
student participation increased. Trends
indicate that the workshop has proven to be
useful as a major outreach undertaking. The
group intends to continue this effort. Would
like to implement suggestions described in the
previous slides. Would look for funding to
support this activity.