Students spent ten hours each day participating in hands-on activities and listening to lectures.
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Undergraduate and graduate students from 23 universities and four countries attended the 2005 Summer Grid Workshop to learn the basics of grid computing and its applications to scientific research.
"This year's workshop went very well," said organizer Soma Mukerjee from the University of Texas at Brownsville. "The goal is to disseminate distributed computing knowledge to students from diverse backgrounds and to develop interdisciplinary collaborations in the future. Feedback from the students and interest from the local and national community indicates that we are working well toward that goal."
The workshop was held July 11–15 at the UTB facility on South Padre Island, Texas. Participants spent ten hours per day listening to lectures and completing hands-on activities. The students, who hail from the U.S., India, Russia and Argentina, represented fields from computer science and engineering to physics and atmospheric science. To encourage collaboration, the 42 students were divided into teams of two, with each team containing one computer science student. Eight lecturers and six teaching assistants were on hand to help students and monitor progress.
In 2004, the workshop received attention from local media, which resulted in more applicants and attendees this year from students in the local Brownsville community. The 2005 workshop received an increased number of applications and increased attention nationwide from grid computing organizations and computing centers.
Forty-two students attended this year's workshop.
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"Forty to fifty percent of last year's workshop participants are still directly involved in grid research," said Mukherjee. "Feedback from this year's students is also very good, and we now have more organizations willing to be partners in future workshops. Momentum for next year is already very high."
The 2005 workshop received funding from the National Science Foundation through a dedicated grant and through a grant to the International Virtual Data Grid Laboratory. UTB also provided funding for hardware, and the University Provost, Jose Martin, welcomed students at the beginning of the workshop. A team of scientists led by Mike Wilde, from Argonne National Laboratory and the GriPhyN project, developed the curriculum, hands-on exercises and network design for the workshop. The 2005 workshop was a collaboration of UTB, the iVDGL and GriPhyN projects, the GRIDS Center, Louisiana State University and the National Center for Supercomputing Applications.
Learn more at the Workshop Web site.
—Katie Yurkewicz
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