1. (World) Cup style community building, does it work? A retrospect on the 2008 Open Education Cup http://OpenEducationCup.org Jan E. Odegard Executive Director Ken Kennedy Institute for Information Technology Rice University odegard@rice.edu; 713.348.3128 Aim: What can you TEACH your colleagues about High Performance Computing?

2. Why Host an Open Education Cup? Hypothesis: With little or no content in the/a repository for a specific content area the users leverage is limited and start-up cost for a new educators is high. Conjecture: Stimulating the creation of a base- corpus of material in a content area will significantly lover the barrier to entry for educators and accelerate new content creation. Question: Will a carrot (small amount of prize money for good content) help get a new content generated in the area of parallel computing?

3. Why Parallel Computing (aka HPC) Parallel computing is increasingly ubiquitous and increasingly a “required” set of skills Too few students learn parallel computing concepts As long as parallel computing is considered an “advanced topic” … supply of parallel software (and teaching material) will lag Creating accessible teaching materials for parallel computing is difficult and time consuming Writing and/or updating a textbook on any subject is difficult and time-consuming at best –keeping up with a fast-changing field like parallel computing magnifies that problem –a ubiquitous change like parallel computing forces changes in all areas of the curriculum

4. The Open Education Cup 2009 Parallel Architectures Parallel Programming Models and Languages Parallel Algorithms and Applications Parallel Software Tools Accelerated Computing Interested authors were asked to prepare content in one of five contest categories:

5. The Good, the Bad and the Ugly (My) time spent without achieving the desired impact Should have spent more (my) time developing partnerships Great idea but miscalculated, we were “outsiders” in community Very few modules submitted before the (extended) deadline We had too many categories (good for judging bad for authors) Did not generate enough content to impact barrier to entry Prospective authors “struggled” with understanding cc-by Field is both mature (for advanced S&E users) and immature (i.e., multi-core revolution accelerates demand for skills) Strong need and interest as demonstrated by sponsor support Community is still talking about how to leverage cnx.org New partnership formed and proposals for content development and community development is progressing well Never underestimate serendipity

6. Serendipity Chuck Severance http://cnx.org/member_profile/drchuck 43 Modules and 1 Course

7. Lessons Learned & Stories Heard Time it takes for new authors to wrap their head around cc-style open-use, open-reuse, and sharing –most get open access and are happy consumers but struggled with why, how and what it means form them to be contributors Time it takes to promote a competition is probably off by a factor of 2 Noticeable attitude: not invented here, my “system” is better, “to much effort” –“we have better ideas for platform/tools” –Cnx.org is a good platform but I will wait for the perfect solution –few (none I could find but I may be biased) offered real alternatives to reach and functionality of cnx.org Topic is still advanced level, relatively small umber of individuals teach this material limiting number of possible authors Do not want to be an author but I want to share my SLIDES

8. Sponsors

9. Featured author (overall Cup winner): Tim Stitt Scientific Computing Group Swiss National Supercomputing Centre (CSCS) Tim leads the HPC Training and Education program for Partnership for Advanced Computing in Europe (PRACE) Tim Stitt http://cnx.org/member_profile/TimStitt 7 Modules and 1 Course

10. Slide courtesy Tim Stitt, CSCS and PRACE 01/2010

15. Summary Hypothesis: With little or no content in the/a repository for a specific content area the users leverage is limited and start-up cost for a new educators is high. Conjecture: Stimulating the creation of a base- corpus of material in a content area will significantly lover the barrier to entry for educators and accelerate new content creation. Question: Will a carrot (small amount of prize money for good content) help get a new content generated in the area of parallel computing? Too soon to say May not have generated enough content Too soon to say May not have generated enough content