2009 News
Pre-Freshman Engineering Program at NMSU |
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Summer 2009 marked the 13th year of New Mexico State University’s Pre-Freshman Engineering Program (PREP), an intensive mathematics-based pre-college summer program that provides educational enrichment for achieving local middle- and high-school students. Although PREP is open to everyone, the program focus is on female and minority populations traditionally underrepresented in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics. AHPCRC is a key funding agency for this program, as a part of its educational outreach mandate, and NMSU’s College of Engineering provides instructors, curriculum, and facilities. Students attend tuition-free (there are no other fees, and lunch is provided), and they may attend PREP for four years before entering college. More than 90% of PREP participants go on to pursue higher education. This year, 163 students successfully completed the six-week program. 144 students received high school credits, and 19 students received 6 college credits and 2 high school credits. Participants came to the NMSU campus to study logic, algebraic structures, technical writing, engineering, computer science, and physics. Off-campus field trips provided an opportunity for hands-on learning. Karen Mikel, program manager, stated, “Through AHPCRC’s commitment to excellence and generous financial support over the next few years, PREP will continue to grow.” PREP is administered through WERC: A Consortium for Environmental Education and Technology Development, as part of the Institute for Energy and the Environment for the NMSU College of Engineering. (WERC, originally known as the Waste-management, Education and Research Consortium, was renamed to reflect its broader mission and accomplishments.) This program recruits students from the three school districts in Doña Ana County NM (Las Cruces, Gadsden, and Hatch). Its goal is to prepare these students for careers in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics by stimulating students’ interest in higher mathematics and science and providing problem-solving sessions to equip them with the necessary tools and the desire to complete pre-calculus and calculus during high school. Friday field trips and Career Awareness Seminars provide the students with opportunities to meet and interact with professionals, who instill in the students the vision and passion to become the scientific leaders of tomorrow. This year marked the inception of PREP 4, a pilot test program for fourth-year PREP participants, who were awarded six college credits upon successful completion of the program. This expansion of the program came about in response to requests from the PREP students, and 19 students completed PREP 4. Students were accepted to PREP 4 based on successful completion of the first three years of PREP with at least an 85% average, a high school GPA of 90%, and not yet having graduated from high school. The PREP 4 curriculum, Special Topics for Engineering IV and Mathematics for Technicians, included an introduction to the various disciplines in engineering and technology, experimental methods, technical reports, and presentation methods. These topics, along with teamwork strategies, ethics, globalization, and life-long learning concepts, were discussed and applied in project-oriented structured design processes to solve a variety of engineering and technical problems. Students were made aware of a variety of relevant professional organizations, and they were introduced to many of the available campus resources, including student organizations, Student Employment Services, Financial Aid, Cooperative Education, libraries, and the offices and resources offered by NMSU Engineering and the Dona Ana Community College (DACC) Technical & Industrial Studies Department. As a part of the enrichment and partnership with the U.S. Army High Performance Computing Laboratory, researchers Dr. Jing He and Dr. Hong Huang conducted classes in Visual C++ programming language, analyzing Internet connection and performance using Visualroute, diagnosing connectivity problems, and analyzing network protocols using Wireshark.
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AHPCRC Summer Institute in Computational Science and Engineering |
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The inaugural AHPCRC Undergraduate Summer Institute in Computational Science and Engineering was held at Stanford University from June 22 to August 14, 2009. Participants included 16 undergraduate students from five universities. Seventeen Stanford professors, research associates, postdocs, and graduate students served as instructors and mentors. This institute represents a key part of the AHPCRC mission: to foster the education of the next generation of scientists and engineers—including those from racially and economically disadvantaged backgrounds—in the fundamental theories and best practices of simulation-based engineering sciences and high performance computing. At this summer's institute, undergraduate students spent their mornings learning computational science and engineering concepts from experts in these fields. Several AHPCRC Stanford researchers offered instruction, including members of the research groups led by Charbel Farhat, Wei Cai, Eric Darve, and Pat Hanrahan. In addition, computer scientists from AHPCRC consortium member High Performance Technologies, Inc. and NVIDIA Corp. instructed the students in their own areas of expertise. In the afternoons, students worked directly with AHPCRC researchers from groups led by Farhat, Darve, Cai, Hanrahan, and Leonidas Guibas. They simulated aircraft wings, submarines, bulletproof fabrics, and advanced nanoscale materials. They taught camera networks to recognize and report their locations. And they helped to design the underlying computer algorithms and architectures that made the other projects possible. The students learned about numerical methods used in computational science and engineering, and they received an introduction to computational engineering methods and modeling, meshing computational domains, ordinary and partial differential equations, and optimization problems. They also learned to program in several commonly used computer languages and systems, including C, MATLAB, MPI, and specialized programming for GPU processors. On August 14, the students presented the results of their research at a seminar, to which representatives from the U.S. Army were invited. Introductory remarks were given by Charbel Farhat, AHPCRC Director; Raju Namburu, Army Research Laboratory AHPCRC Cooperative Agreement Manager; and Barbara Bryan, AHPCRC Research and Outreach Manager. LTC Fredrick C. Ludden, Military Deputy, Army Research Laboratory Computational and Information Sciences Directorate, offered concluding remarks. |
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AHPCRC 2009 Education Program at UTEP |
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The 2009 AHPCRC Education Program at the University of Texas at El Paso (UTEP) aims to increase the number of middle-school students capable of and interested in technical subjects by equipping middle-school teachers of mathematics and their students with appropriate motivating examples of the usefulness of mathematical concepts and by providing both the teachers and students with interactive computational technologies that can be used to refine associated mathematical knowledge and skills. In some cases different instances of an example are encapsulated in a computational tool, while in other cases the examples stand by themselves and can be, if desired, paired with computational tools. A team of three undergraduate students (Victor Jordan Barraza, Fernando Nava, and Jason Shultes), one graduate student (Oscar Andrade), two faculty members (David Novick and Patricia Teller), and one research staff member (Sarala Arunagiri) in the Department of Computer Science worked through the summer to develop a set of prototypes to motivate concepts related to probability and to refine the understanding and application of these concepts. The examples and associated computational tools that the team produced have been mapped to lessons and problems in the mathematics textbooks used by the El Paso Independent School District (EPISD) in the 6th, 7th, and 8th grades. A Web site associated with the project will disseminate the project’s products—the motivating examples and computational tools—as well as the mappings of examples and tools to textbook lessons and problems. Specific dissemination is aimed at middle-school teachers in EPISD, at faculty and staff who conduct outreach programs, and at AHPCRC partners. A section of the Web site will enable users of the examples and tools to provide feedback on the educational materials and their usefulness. The project team worked with the staff of UTEP’s Educational Talent Search (ETS) program—a TRIO program (see below) working with more than 600 low-income middle- and high-school youth in the El Paso area to provide information about college admission, careers, scholarships, financial aid and SAT/ACT preparation. ETS staff and the project team held a workshop for middle-school students on Monday, 10 August 2009, to get feedback on the prototypes developed to date. Eighteen 7th and 8th grade students from two schools participated. The ETS staff recruited the students (we developed brochures for this purpose), brought the students to campus, fed them breakfast, brought them to the workshop, and then took them to lunch, provided a campus tour in the form of a scavenger hunt, and returned them to the schools. In the workshop, the team’s undergraduate students presented some of the examples they developed, along with some of the computational tools they identified. The examples included: At the end of the workshop, each student was given a certificate of participation and a Rubik’s cube. As part of the workshop, the middle-school participants provided feedback on the motivating examples and the tools that they tried out, and the project team compiled simple descriptive statistics from their responses. The most popular computational tools were a simulation of fire in a forest using a grid populated with trees and a simulation of the population trends of a world of grass, rabbits, and foxes, again using a grid to implement the simulation. Preliminary review of the feedback and the reaction of the students and staff indicated that the project has an excellent chance of success! The project's next step, slated for this Fall, is a workshop for middle-school math teachers. This workshop is being designed to motivate the teachers to adopt the examples developed by the project and to develop examples of their own. In addition, the teachers will be encouraged to adopt the computational tools identified by the project, and to identify other computational tools that support their lesson plans. The workshop will give the teachers opportunities to provide the project team with feedback and to influence the direction of the project. During the Fall semester, the project's undergraduate students will be available to work with the teachers and visit the schools to aid the teachers in the use of the teaching materials. |
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AHPCRC Director Receives 2009 John von Neumann Medal |
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Professor Charbel Farhat, AHPCRC program director, has received the 2009 John von Neumann Medal from the U.S. Association of Computational Mechanics (USACM) for “outstanding and sustained contributions in high performance computing, fluid–structure interaction, and computational acoustics and their impact on real-world engineering applications.” Charbel Farhat, the Vivian Church Hoff Professor of Aircraft Structures and Chair of the Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics at Stanford University, was named director of the AHPCRC in 2007. He is internationally known for his outstanding research contributions to computational mechanics, numerical analysis, and high performance computing. He has pioneered the development of parallel finite element solution methods that have enabled faster and more accurate analyses of a broad range of engineering and pathfinder systems such as re-entry vehicles, modern fighter aircraft, advanced Formula 1 cars, aircraft carriers, underwater systems, electronic packages, and nano-scale optical shutters. His achievements in this area have been recognized by several professional societies, including the IEEE Computer Society, which awarded him the Fernbach Award for “outstanding contributions to the development of parallel numerical algorithms and parallel software packages that have helped the mechanical engineering world to embrace parallel processing technology.” His innovative theoretical and computational works on computational fluid dynamics on moving grids and fluid–structure interaction phenomena have contributed to a renaissance of research on nonlinear computational aeroelasticity. These works have also had a profound impact on practitioners such as the flight test engineers at the Edwards Air Force Base, who stated that Farhat’s research has enabled them “to better simulate certain structural and aerodynamic flight qualities with the improved models.” They stated that this should allow them”to perform fewer flight tests and save time when we are flight testing.” Computational Mechanics is concerned with the use of computational methods and devices to study events governed by the principles of mechanics. It is a fundamentally important part of computational science and engineering, concerned with the use of computational approaches to characterize, predict, and simulate physical events and engineering systems governed by the laws of mechanics. The USACM is a prominent association that promotes U.S. research, commercial, and academic activities in the general area of computational mechanics. The John von Neumann Medal is the highest award it bestows to honor individuals who have made outstanding, sustained contributions in the field of computational mechanics, generally over periods representing substantial portions of their professional careers. The medal is awarded every two years at the time of the National Congress of the Association.
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