Educational Activities
For the past five years, NCAR's Scientific Computing Division has
co-hosted the Colorado Computational Science Fair (CCSF) in conjunction
with Colorado State University to encourage high school students to
learn more about computational science. The CCSF is intended to serve
as a supercomputing/information technology competition for high school
students throughout the state of Colorado. In FY1998 the CCSF was held at
NCAR on Saturday, May 9, 1998.
Students from the states of Colorado and Wyoming
entered 68 projects into the competition. Internet connections
were provided for 40 projects. Group and individual projects were
submitted in the areas of Computational Science and Information
Technology. Two computational science projects were sent to the
national Adventures in Supercomputing Expo (held on June 19-20, 1998
in Washington, DC). The "Recursive Topographic Cost Analysis Project"
from George Washington High School in Denver took first place in the
Advanced Mathematics Category.
SCD's website provides a list of the 1998
CCSF
winners.
SCD continues to provide access to its supercomputers for undergraduate
and graduate university classes. These computing resources are provided
for classes engaged in modeling and simulations requiring high-performance
computers and for classes studying new architectures, such as Cray's T3D.
A few high school students have also been granted access for Colorado
Computational Science Fair projects.
In FY1998, SCD's computing resources were used by five classes
in a variety of disciplines. Fifty-four students used SCD's
supercomputing resources, including the Cray Y-MP8, Cray J90,
and the T3D, accumulating over 100 CPU hours of charges.