Education Allocation

Education allocations are intended to broaden the impact of Blue Waters and contribute to the development of a national workforce with expertise in petascale computing. Up to 1 percent (or 1.8 million node-hours) per year of the system's computational capacity is available for educational projects, including courses, workshops, and institutes. Projects may be requested for up to one year, although many will typically cover a one- to two-week period or a semester.  It is recommended that allocation requests be limited to at most 25,000 node hours; extensions may be requested based on progress reports.

Possible educational topics include:

• Projects that focus on large-scale datasets and optimization of I/O file access.

• Developing and testing of codes that use advanced methods, languages and tools (Partitioned Global Address Space (PGAS) language use, fault tolerant application, library or tools development using redundancy, migration, application check pointing, or other mechanisms for large systems).

• Optimizing and scaling of a community code to a large-scale simulation.

• Optimizing or developing new libraries and tools that will leverage architecture features or processor counts unique to the Blue Waters system.

• Modeling of systems or codes.

• Focusing on the unique scale and scope of the Blue Waters system.

• Use of large-scale computation and data analytics in discipline specific classes and events.

The Blue Waters Education Allocations Committee anticipates that up to 20 events will be supported at a time.

Timeline

Proposals for education allocations will be reviewed within two weeks of submission. Proposals are due the first working day of each month. Responses will be provided roughly by mid month following submission, once all information is provided. Events may involve teams of students but account share is prohibited, so each student has to work within their own account. The event description should clearly link a set of educational goals with the unique capabilities of the Blue Waters system.

Eligibility

Education proposals may be submitted by a faculty member, researcher, or staff member employed at any U.S. institution.

To qualify:

1. the project lead must be an employee of the institution, and
2. all information and source code ("content") placed on the Blue Waters system must be free of export controls.¹

In addition, awards of Blue Waters allocations are more likely if the course falls within certain parameters.²

Education allocations are intended to support up to 100 participants per event.  If you have more participants, let us know, and we will assess the current load on the system and our ability to support additional people.

Proposal Content (not to exceed 5 pages)

• Team Members: Name, title, affiliation and contact information for the principal investigator and any other faculty/staff involved in the project.

• Event Abstract: Provide a one-paragraph (150 words) project summary and indicate why Blue Waters is necessary for this activity. This summary will be shared on the Blue Waters website.

• Project Description: Describe the goal(s) and nature of the education event that is proposed for the use of the Blue Waters system. The description should include the field(s) of study and the learning goals for the project, and should demonstrate how the project will allow the students to achieve these goals. Provide an estimate of the grade level and the anticipated number of students that will participate in the project. Include a description of the faculty/instructor experience with the proposed effort, student experience, and a description of the student tasks in the project. Describe the expected educational outcomes of the project. Indicate the benefits of using the Blue Water system over other HPC resources. See Footnote 2 for further guidelines on designing your project.

• Resources required: Describe the system requirements for the project, including the number of node-hours (16 AMD Bulldozer cores per traditional XE node, and 8 AMD Bulldozer cores + 1 NVIDIA Kepler GPU per XK accelerator node), the balance between x86 CPUs and Kepler GPUs needed for runs (on average and maximum), and any storage or data access requirements, such as amounts of data to be transferred in and out of the machine.  Please indicate your plans to use MPI or other parallel programming methods. Please explain the level of scaling and/or whether you plan to run single node jobs, and your rationale for the approach. If the system requirements will change during the course of the event, please describe the anticipated changes. Describe the software requirements for the event including compiler and library needs, performance tools, requirements for other applications packages or tools, and version numbers if there are unique version requirements.

• Support Plan: The project lead and his/her staff are expected to directly handle all questions from the students/participants. The event lead may contact designated Blue Waters support staff to address questions he or she is unable to answer. Indicate any training or information the participating faculty and staff will need to facilitate the event.

• Final report: The event PI is required to provide a report at the end of the project. This report should include a summary of the effort, the number of students, a complete student list (name, academic status, and institution), event assessments from the students, the learning outcomes, lessons learned, what was unique about access to Blue Waters, publications including curricular materials, and highlights from the activity. Information from the final report will be shared with the National Science Foundation and included on the Blue Waters website.  For detailed instructions and how to submit reports see https://bluewaters-archive.ncsa.illinois.edu/eduallocreports.

Additional Required Documents

This additional documentation is not included in the 5-page proposal limit:

• Resumes of the event PI and the participating faculty and staff (maximum two-pages each) emphasizing their experience to lead the proposed project.

• Descriptions of venue and instructional equipment.

• Descriptions of other computational and data resources being used for the event.

• Provide a project timeline, including start and end dates, due dates for problem sets and assignments.

• If this is for an accredited course, please include the sponsoring institution's course title and syllabus.

Please submit education allocation requests via https://bluewaters-archive.ncsa.illinois.edu/new_account/bwspecialprojects. Responses will be provided within two weeks after the submission deadlines. Responses on proposals not meeting the conditions set forth in Footnote 2 may be delayed.
 

Footnotes

Blue Waters is supported by the National Science Foundation (awards OCI-0725070 and ACI-1238993) the State of Illinois, and the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency.

Contact Blue Waters Team with questions regarding this page.
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