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The New Mexico National Labs (Los Alamos, Sandia, the universities (NMSU, UNM, etc) and others came together in a rather awesome program about 13 years ago. The Adventures in Supercomputing Challenge Program gives high school students access to modern supercomputers to do scientific programming projects. They are given mentoring and instruction by volunteers as well as volunteered CPU time and access. Schools lacking net access are provided it by the participants, etc. After all their work, there is a competition based on how much was learned, presentations, science done, and final reports. It is a lot of fun. It's really hard.

I was originally a student in it waaaay back when it was getting underway (1990 & 1991) and then acted as a mentor for the next 5 years. I had a first place team and a third place team in those five years. I worked with kids that were often C students because they were bored as h*ll in class and often after seeing what they could do would go on to work harder to improve their grades to get into some very good universities.

Kids often rose to the challenge far and above what I would have thought they'd do. If the kids needed to learn the necessary math for the scienc they wanted to do we'd crash course it. I had kids that had been doing second year algebra doing partial differential equations by the end of the six months of work and able to understand it, frex. They always learned the science and programming that was required as well. This was their work, not mine. I could give guidance and knowledge, but couldn't do the work for them. Some of the science done was thermodynamics, astrophysics, environmental science, and fluid dyanmics, frex.

Now you may not be able to donate supercomputing time, but you might want keep this in mind when you go to think about what HS kids are interested in. Kids are often interested in a lot. You just have to be willing to teach them in a way that they'll remember, show them its useful, and make it interesting.

Perhaps taking PIXAR's high profile into account, Terry concedes that "The commercial environment is still best served by Linux clusters" at the end of the article.

As one of Cray's most prominent customers, Los Alamos National Labs (LANL) implicitly makes a better argument. They've long advocated clusters for massive computing purposes, as evidenced by the Avalon, Loki, et al.

It's also worth mentioning that Loki won the Gordon Bell Price/Performance Prize in 1997.

And let's not forget the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory's Beowulf cluster(s).

Fun side note: I've never gotten to see these clusters in RL, but I did get to see Sandia National Labs' Paragon and some other boxen when I was there in 1995 as part of the AiS Challenge.

I donated time to volunteer work at a then local high school - I have since moved - teaching students in project oriented programming competition formerly called the New Mexico Supercomputing Challenge (now called the Adventures in Supercomputing Challenge when they rolled it and the Sandia NL sponsored rival program together).

Students were brogutht ogether in small teams and taught programming, often from the ground up, math, and science towards a project. Often a lot of backfilling took place to get the students up to the point where they could understand the math and science behind the project as well as actually grasp what it would take to write code for the supercomputers. It was very challenging and a lot of fun.

It has always perplexed me when we have people so constantly complaining about the school system that those that have the time and energy to volunteer do not simply go down to their local school system and volunteer. Make an appointment with the principal and see where you can help. I betcha he or she will be very ecstatic if you can bring ideas and time to the table so long as it does not tax the school resource wise (budgets being tight things...)

The rewards of seeing a student's face light up when they get it are well worth the time...

Wow, someone who remembers the Challenge...

Disclaimer: I'm the goofy wonk who wrote the original crypto code project some time ago...

A good place to look for information about potential projects for your class is the prior years' archive. http://www.challenge.nm.org/Archive/

Some of the projects have HTML reports -- let your students read those and see what others have done and it will probably spawn a few ideas for stuff to do.

An alternate solution is to browse through a few CS pages and see what's going on in the introductory CS classes. For quite a few good ideas, check out the assignments for Princeton's infamous COS126 assignments.

-Chris

The web site has links to previous projects to give you some ideas about the kind of work that some of the teams have done, but overall I will say that the work is of remarkably high quality. This is a school-year-long event, so many of the projects will need to be shortened for semester-long use. They may also need to be made more simple.

As a side note, I should mention that although all of the projects can benefit from supercomputer time, the Challenge is over 10 years old as a program now. As a result, most of the projects run find on mid-range desktops (but are, neverthless, computationally intensive tasks).

The web site has links to previous projects to give you some ideas about the kind of work that some of the teams have done, but overall I will say that the work is of remarkably high quality. This is a school-year-long event, so many of the projects will need to be shortened for semester-long use. They may also need to be made more simple.

As a side note, I should mention that although all of the projects can benefit from supercomputer time, the Challenge is over 10 years old as a program now. As a result, most of the projects run find on mid-range desktops (but are, neverthless, computationally intensive tasks).

I'm not saying there is no problem. Clearly there is. But whining about things that clearly are available is not going to solve the issue.