Shodor Education Foundation awarded $2.7M grant for extending National Computational Science Institute beyond North Carolina

Principal investigators and founding partners on the project hail from several US states and include Robert M. Panoff, Shodor Foundation, North Carolina; Holly P. Hirst, Appalachian State University, North Carolina; Eric Jakobsson, National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) and University of Illinois, Illinois; and Dennis E. Stevenson, Clemson University, South Carolina. Dan Warner in the Mathematics department at Clemson, will serve as the head of an advisory committee of scientists and educators from across the country.

NCSI expands the scope of Shodor's undergraduate programmes beyond North Carolina and the region and plans to reach out to more than 1000 undergraduate faculty per year for three years. Through NCSI, Shodor, and its partners will offer a proven, modular set of in-person, video-conferenced, and Web-accessible workshops, seminars, and support activities to introduce the hands-on use of computational science, numerical models and data visualisation tools across the undergraduate curriculum.

Shodor is a longtime partner with NCSA, the lead organisation in the National Computational Science Alliance, and the Education, Outreach, and Training component of the Partnerships for Advanced Computational Infrastructure (EOT-PACI). Through these relationships, NCSI will be able to utilise technologies being developed for high-performance parallel computing, and remote collaboration, as well as grid technologies. NCSI will also be able to link to research organisations worldwide through the Access Grid, a collaborative audio-visual environment being deployed by the Alliance.

NCSI is the only programme of its kind that specifically targets teams of faculty from predominantly undergraduate institutions, Minority Serving Institutions (MSIs), and community colleges whose students are either the next generation of scientists and engineers, the next generation of K-12 teachers, or both. Also unique is that the programme represents a partnership of states as well as a collaboration among NSF, the Alliance, the Burroughs Wellcome Fund, Sigma Xi, multiple vendors, and more than two dozen undergraduate institutions and high performance computing centers, including the Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center, Ohio Supercomputer Center, and the North Carolina Supercomputing Center.