UQ and RCC will sponsor four Queensland Academy for Science, Mathematics and Technology (QASMT) Year 10 students to attend SC18, the world’s largest supercomputing conference, in Dallas, Texas, 11–16 November.
Next month, QASMT will select a team comprising two girls and two boys to attend SC18.
Chaperoned by QASMT staff, the four students will collect information at the conference — through interviews, hands-on demonstrations, workshops and meeting with exhibitors — to share with other students in their Computer Science class and the school’s lunch-time high-performance computing (HPC) club.
Attending SC18 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.
The RCC team and QASMT students who attended past supercomputing conferences will guide the new team of students as they prepare to attend SC18.
Madeleine Brookes, QASMT's Head of Humanities, Computer Science, Technology and Engineering, said the school’s ongoing relationship with RCC provides the opportunity for its students to access the innovative world of HPC, combining academic and practical approaches. “The annual funding also allows us to offer an equitable selection process, where students are selected on merit, rather than their ability to afford the cost of the trip,” she said.
Each year since 2014, UQ and RCC have sponsored high school students from Brisbane’s QASMT or Faith Lutheran College (Redlands) to attend the international Supercomputing Conference (SC). They join students from Melbourne’s John Monash Science School (JMSS) at the event.
In total, 12 QASMT students have attended SC thus far.
RCC Director Prof. David Abramson first initiated the program with JMSS in 2011 when he worked at Monash University. When he arrived at UQ and RCC in 2014, he extended the program to include Queensland.
“Our goal is to excite students about potential applications of supercomputing as early as possible,” said Prof. Abramson. “I have been delighted with the outcomes to date. One year the students came back all excited about the Internet of Things, and started instrumenting the environmental conditions in their schools. Some of the students have shaped their future studies based on that one experience. Diane Salim, who attended SC11 as a John Monash Science School student, is now a final-year Astrophysics student at the Australian National University.”
Outside of the conference, students from QASMT, JMSS and Faith Lutheran College (Redlands) have collaborated on learning projects within their HPC clubs for the last four years.
Last year, students in the schools’ HPC clubs learnt about parallel processing and parallel programming in order to make sense of, and to utilise, ‘big data’. QASMT students learnt C/C++, Open MP and MPI as the first step to understanding parallel programming and gaining knowledge and skills in the field of HPC.
This year, the students in QASMT’s HPC club are exploring the social and ethical issues arising from the implementation of HPC in various sectors.
From this month, QASMT will, for the first time, also provide opportunities for Year 10 students to explore HPC as an option in their Computer Science class. The goal is for the students to gain a comprehensive understanding of the benefits and challenges of HPC. The school will work with RCC and JMSS to help shape the HPC curriculum.
If the curriculum is successful, it will be reviewed and embedded next year into both QASMT’s International Computer Science course and the newly introduced Digital Society, Information Technology in a Global Society (ITGS) course. In the Computer Science course, students will explore the technical side of HPC, such as programming languages, hardware and developments. In the ITGS course, students will explore applications for HPC along with social and ethical issues.
