On Tue, Nov 20, 2007 at 12:33:43PM -0600, Nathan Moore wrote: > I regularly teach a college course in a physics department that deals with > scientific computation. After students take the course, I expect that > they'll be able to write simple "c-tran" style programs for data analysis, > write basic MD or MC simulations, and be fairly fluent in Mathematica. <snip>
I have a related (I hope) question. I don't teach a course, but some colleagues and I are in the position of "computation ambassador" to a range of researchers (faculty, grad, and undergrad). Our semi-imaginary "classic case" is a professor in the humanities who might have an abstract sense that large-scale computation could aid their research, but no idea how to actually apply the available technology. In the worst case, this person regards anything with a command line as terra incognita, and will require some serious hand holding early on. We can provide the hand holding, and we know a fair amount about computers, clusters, what's (im)possible, but none of us have a deep technical background in the "research" part of research computing, so we've spent a lot of time lately asking ourselves how to bridge the gap. So I hope I'm not hijacking the thread, but beyond issuing a "me too" to Nathan's textbook question I'd also like to know if anybody has some general tips on how to get started, a sort of "adult primer" on research computing which we could benefit from ourselves as well as passing along to the curious. Thanks, -j _______________________________________________ Beowulf mailing list, Beowulf@beowulf.org To change your subscription (digest mode or unsubscribe) visit http://www.beowulf.org/mailman/listinfo/beowulf
