Distributed Computing Project

Overview

In October 2000, Dennis Schneider and Andrew Leahy were awarded an NSF-CCLI Educational Materials Development grant for a project entitled "Distributed Computation, Numerical Methods, and Scientific Computing for Mathematics and Science Students in an Undergraduate Mathematics Department" which seeks to develop two numerical analysis courses in the undergraduate mathematics curriculum. An overview of the grant is available at at the NSF Fastlane site.

There are three goals for the project as outlined in the original proposal:

First, we seek to demonstrate that a scientific computing curriculum incorporating distributed computation is possible at a small undergraduate institution. Second, we seek to develop materials that will enhance student understanding of the mathematical questions which can be answered by distributed computation and will facilitate the adoption of this sort of curriculum at similar institutions. Third, we seek to develop an introductory course in computational mathematics that makes use of the native programming capabilities of Mathematica, is accessible even to students in their first year of college, and prepares students for more advanced computational mathematics courses.

This site is a work in progress which gathers together our results from the project. It is organized into several sections which highlight different aspects of the project.

1. Support material for the development of a distributed computing cluster. A primary focus of the project is the development of course material for an advanced numerical analysis course in the undergraduate mathematics curriculum which makes use of distributed computing. Our belief is that since most mathematics departments already have access to computing labs for their coursework it should also be possible for those labs to be used as distributed computing clusters. The material on this link brings together our work in the development of our distributed computing lab at Knox College.
2. Support material for our low-level introductory course in numerical analysis. One leg of our project is to address the problem of numerical analysis courses which are targetted at an unnecessarily high level. Previously, our single numerical analysis course was tailored to mathematics majors with a background in linear algebra and several years of experience in college-level mathematics courses. However, we recognized two things: (1) that many topics in numerical analysis don't require linear algebra and (2) that many of the topics in numerical analysis are accessible to students with only a background in calculus. The material on this link brings together our work to develop a low-level numerical analysis course targetted at these students.
3. Support material for our advanced course in numerical analysis. The second leg of our project is the development of material which will allow topics in distributed computing to be brought into the undergraduate mathematics curriculum.