Chairman:		Tom Murphy (Contra Costa College)
Date:		January 17, 2003, 10-2 PM, AA-216
Present:		Charlie Verboom and Greg Kurtzer (Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory) Jeff Becker (NASA Ames) Mark Graham (Global Netoptex, Inc) David Evensky (Sandia National Laboratory)
CCC Present:		Priscilla Leadon, Carlos Murillo, Manny Gonsalves, Leslie Asher
Pre-meeting handouts:		http://contracosta.edu/hpc/cic/ contains the HPC course of study which was passed the CCC curriculum committee on ten days after this meeting on January 27, 2003. This course of studies will be revised as this HPC Advisory Board progresses through the curriculum. The first semester courses in the curriculum were already revised based on the findings from this meeting. An ITIEP (http://www.itiep.org/) board meeting was held to discuss a model Unix/Linux curriculum. It will incorporate one or more of the courses of the HPC curriculum as electives. The HPC curriculum will use  as many courses of the ITITEP model curriculum as possible and/or will suggest modifications to the ITIEP model curriculum. We are working to have the CCC HPC curriculum become an ITIEP model curriculum.
Course of studies:		The goal of this meeting was to reduce the total number of units from 41+ units to around 32 units so a student is taking around two courses of the major per semester. Additionally, the goal was to identify the courses desired as well as a description of the content of the courses. As a result of the discussion we realized that there were three highly related, but distinct technicians that the program should produce: sys admin, net admin and security admin. They should share a common set of courses differing only in the final one or two courses of the specialty. It was noted that quite often a single person in a company takes on one or more of these roles, thus it is natural that the entry level person we are helping create should have essentially the same knowledge. The programmer support role has little overlap with the three admin roles. We also realized that the HPC specific portions needed to come at the beginning as a form of orientation to the major, just before branching into the three admin positions, and at the end as capstone project.
Hardware Knowledge:		We deemed it essential for all to know the basics of PC hardware and software maintenance. We debated requiring this as a prerequisite in order to keep the total program units manageable. Even though we suspect a significant number of people will enter this course of studies as a person currently working in an IT job, we also wanted to allow for the possibility of someone entering the program with little IT knowledge. Our compromise was to create a 9 week short course that would review the material covered in an A+ certification course. We also shortened the HPC intro course to also be 9 weeks since it was possible to scale back the depth of the material that would be covered.
Admin core sequence:		We removed the WAN course from the sequence since WAN info would adequately be covered in the LAN and router courses. We plan to have all the core courses be standard system administration and networking courses. At future board meeting we will review each course to ensure the course content includes all material needed by the HPC technician. This will include a suggested sequence of lab exercises.
HPC Practicum:		The HPC practicum course will provide an overview of the three HPC specialty courses for the three specializations: HPC sysadmin, HPC netadmin, and HPC security admin. It will also serve as an advanced HPC overview course covering such topics as low latency issues; kinds of clusters and issues of selection; and run time library issues.
Programming support sequence:		We realized that it unrealistic to state we are preparing someone to be even an entry level parallel programmer in just two years. Instead, a much needed entry level position is that of HPC programming support where the individual would assist a scientist in getting their code to run on a cluster. In the future we may target programming electives that could be used by a post associate degree student to become an entry level parallel programmer. The courses of the programming sequence are tentatively identified as: C++, Development Tools, Perl, Intro to Parallel Programming, and Performance and Optimization. We debated quite awhile whether there should be a separate course in MPI (Message Passing Interface). We ultimately agreed that it should be a taught as part of a broader context. There is certainly room for a future elective course exclusively focusing on MPI.
New business:		Mark is looking into getting his company, Netoptex, to donate ~6 Cisco 7500 high speed routers to the CCC Supercomputer Center. These routers would be used in support of the networking classes. Davis is looking into getting his company, Sandia National Laboratory, to donate Myrinet interconnections to the CCC Supercomputer Center. This donation is dependent on the Incyte donation which will define the number of nodes in the system. The significance of this donation is both that CCC will be able to offer a Supercomputer Center mirroring that currently in use, but it will also allow support of both a high speed data interconnect between nodes as well as a lower speed administrative interconnect.
Date of next meeting:		February 28, 2003