By RCC and QASMT
Year 10 high school students from Brisbane and Melbourne took part in a RCC-hosted introductory data science workshop on Tuesday, 28 May.
Three teachers and 15 students from the Queensland Academy for Science, Mathematics and Technology were bussed to RCC’s seminar room on UQ’s St Lucia Campus for the event.
Ten John Monash Science School students in Melbourne and instructor Dr Robert (Bob) Sinkovits from the San Diego Supercomputing Center (SDSC) joined the QASMT students via a three-way videoconferencing link, displayed on RCC’s large-screen tiled display.
Dr Sinkovits taught the students about the role of high performance computing (HPC) and parallel processing in data science, and gave a live demonstration using SDSC’s Comet supercomputer. He showed how parallelism can be used to accelerate programs by splitting them into multiples threads of execution.
He also introduced Python and Jupyter Notebook as useful software packages for data science, and demonstrated NumPy, a tool for scientific computing with Python.
The students learnt how Python can be applied in the real world, which helped them understand potential career pathways in coding. They also learnt the use of Jupyter, an open-source Web application that allows documents that contain live code, equations, visualisations and narrative text to be created and shared.
Dr Sinkovits provided helpful tips about how to use NumPy, which enables programmers to make effective use of matrices and multi-dimensional vector calculations in their research.
NumPy is a versatile and beneficial tool for scientific researchers using Python for machine learning, Artificial Intelligence or simulations. Using an executable Jupyter Notebook he created, Dr Sinkovits demonstrated NumPy’s use in arithmetic, multidimensional arrays and graphing.
Following Dr Sinkovits’ presentation, RCC Director Professor David Abramson spoke about UQ’s HPCs and their applications.
After the workshop, JMSS teacher Toan Huynh said, “We had students peering in through the windows during recess, and a couple of Year 11 students join in at the very end.”
QASMT teacher Madeleine Brookes said, “There was lots of buzz from the students in the bus on the way home.”
The workshop was planned as part of QASMT and JMSS’s HPC curriculum and as a lead-up event to SC19, the world’s largest supercomputing conference. A handful of students from QASMT and JMSS will be selected to attend SC19, in Denver, Colorado, USA, 17–22 November.
RCC will sponsor four QASMT students and their chaperones to attend SC19. RCC has run the sponsorship program since 2014.
Attending SC19 will allow the students to deepen their understanding of HPC, make contacts, and further their knowledge of the technologies, careers and current projects being completed in the field of supercomputing.
Prof. Abramson is vice-chair of SC19’s invited speaker committee and a member of its papers committee.
