History of the Contra Costa College HPC Program
Original Contra Costa PC Cluster: September, 2001
 | The original cluster formed from discarded PCs by Computer and Communications Technology (CCT) teacher Rick Figuera. |
Formation of the National Center of Excellence for High Performance Computing Technology (NCEHPCT): September 3, 2002
The NCEHPCT consortium (http://highperformancecomputing.org/) was formed by the National Science Foundation (NSF) via grant 0202452. The Consortium is composed of four community colleges:
- Contra Costa College
- Maui Community College in Hawaii
- Pellissippi State Technical Community College in Tennessee
- Wake Technical Community College in North Carolina
New co-PI at Pellissippi State Technical Community College: November 5, 2002
On November 5, 2002, Michael Lusk became the co-PI of the NCEHPCT grant for Pellissippi State Technical Community College
 | The 16 racks of dual dual SMPs which constitute the 64 CPU
cluster donated by Incyte Genomics. The picture shows, left to right, Randy
Watkins (Dean of Technology), McKinley Williams (Contra Costa College Vice
President), Tom Murphy (Director of Contra Costa College HPC Center), and Stu Jackson
from Incyte Genomics. |
 | The 64 CPU Cluster Assembled and Working. |
Renewal of the NCEHPCT Grant for a Second Year: April 9, 2003
 | The 16 CPU cluster composed of 8 racks of dual SMPs purchased
through NSF funds. |
New PI for NCEHPCT: September 11, 2003
Bob Borchers became the PI of the NCEHPCT grant. Bob had previously served as chair of the National Visiting Committee (NVC) for the grant.
Breaking the Digital Divide: December 9, 2003
This seminar, led by CCC HPC Center Director Tom Murphy, focused on informing
local math and science High School teachers of four interrelated issues:
- The Fall 2004 start of the Contra Costa College HPC technician program
- The revised Computer Science program
- The tools of the Shodor Foundation, particularly of Project Interactivate
- The existence of summer internships for both HS teachers and students at
the Lawrence Berkeley National Lab (LBL)
A strong outreach was made to local high schools including the continuation and
other special focus high schools, as well as several neighboring
out-of-district high schools. The attendance by high school was as follows:
| High School | Number of Teachers |
|---|
| Hercules Middle and High School | 7 |
| Richmond High | 7 |
| John F Kennedy High School | 1 |
| Middle College High School | 1 |
| El Cerrito High School | 2 |
| De Anza High School | 2 |
| Kappa High School | 1 |
| Gompers High School | 3 |
| Vista High School | 6 |
| Pinole Valley High School | 1 |
| Total | 31 |
|---|
School to Career Symposium: January 8, 2004
| Ethnicity | Female | Male | Total |
|---|
| Asian | 8 | 17 | 25 |
| African American | 15 | 13 | 28 |
| Hispanic | 30 | 45 | 75 |
| White | 23 | 24 | 47 |
| Other | | | |
| Total | 76 | 99 | 175 |
|---|
 | CCC HPC Center Director Tom Murphy delivering a keynote address on the
upcoming High Performance Computing Technician program at Contra Costa College. |
HPC Advisory Board Meeting: January 9, 2004
HPC Advisory Board Meeting: February 13, 2004
HPC Interview by Chancellor Chuck Spense: February 23 2004
Community College District Chancellor Chuck Spense interviewed RETC Director Tom Murphy about the HPC technology training program and the kind of students which by suitable for this program. The interview was aired twice a week throughout the month of May on CCTV, the Contra Costa Television Channel.
League of Innovation Conference: February 29 to March 2, 2004
RETC Director Tom Murphy and NCEHPCT Director Dennis Vaillancourt represented the HPC National Center at the League of Innovation Conference held at the San Francisco Hilton. It was a good opportunity to present our HPC technology program to a large number of educators.
HPC Articulation Forum: March 17, 2003
This was a meeting of CCC HPC Center Director Tom Murphy, CCC Dean of Economic
Development Dean Priscilla Leadon, Devi Jameson and Dave Ressano of West County
Unified School to Career, and seven computer related teachers from four local
high schools. It was a direct outgrowth of the "Breaking the Digital Divide"
seminar of December 9, 2003. 577 high school students are taught by these seven
teachers.
We discussed how we could waive students having to take CCC HPC
courses if they have covered a sufficient amount of similar material in one or
more high school classes. Our next meeting will involve comparing course
outlines and syllabi from both sets of courses to begin the articulation
process. In the past, arrangements have been made where students would receive
simultaneous credit from both high school and college. This is no longer
possible under current California constraints. We identified A+ and networking
courses as possible areas of articulation.
CCC HPC Center Director Tom Murphy will also be working with two of the high school
teachers to creating precursor high school classes for the HPC program.
High School Visitation Day: April 1, 2004
| High School | Female | Male | Total |
|---|
| De Anza | 21 | 21 | 42 |
| Pinole Valley | 18 | 9 | 27 |
| Richmond High | 3 | 20 | 23 |
| Hercules High | 7 | 11 | 18 |
| El Cerrito | 12 | 9 | 21 |
| Kennedy High | 7 | 4 | 11 |
| Total | 68 | 74 | 142 |
|---|
CCC Counselor Update: April 7, 2004
The purpose of this meeting was to remind the nine CCC counselors of the
Fall 2004 start of the HPC program. The typical HPC student profile was also
presented: a problem solver. A student who enjoys maintaining their PC
is a great candidate. It was emphasized that students should have at least a
strong knowledge of algebra. It was desirable that the student be capable of
taking calculus. Note the word capable, since many appropriate students will
not see themselves capable of neither higher math nor a four year degree, but
be, in fact, quite capable of both. Potential students should also be focused
on starting a job as the graduate the two year program.
The counseling department requested 500 HPC fliers to include as part of
their new student packet for Fall 2004 orientation.
Demystifying High Performance Computing using Low-Cost Linux Workstations: May 18, 2004
Locating and Training Employees for HPC via Internships and Ongoing Professional Education: May 18, 2004
These two seminars were run back to back on the evening of May 18. Greg
Kurtzer and Charlie Verboom, both from Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory, joined
CCC HPC Center Director, Tom Murphy, in presenting the seminar to the 23 attendees
covering the material outlined in the agenda. The target audience for the first
seminar was businesses interested in learning more about High Performance
Computing; while the second was targeted towards businesses already using or
planning to use HPC. The common theme was to develop a common educational
partnership.
HPC educational opportunities presented to One Stop Career Center: May 19, 2004
The San Pablo One-Stop Career Center is a self-directed career resource center. The Center provides resources and services that are focused on assisting any member of the community with job search, training information and career assistance. CCC HPC Center Director, Tom Murphy, presented an overview of HPC and the HPC technician program to six job seekers. Two were quite interested, of which one is an out-of-work system administrator, who would make an excellent addition to the program.
CCC HPC Program Recognized: May 21, 2004
The CCC HPC program was recognized at the "Celebrate Success!", the Contra Costa Business/Education Initiatives awards luncheon which was jointly sponsored by the Contra Costa County Office of Education, the Contra Costa Community College District, and the Contra Costa Economic Partnership. RETC Director Tom Murphy received the award.
HPC educational opportunities presented to Street Tech students: May 24, 2004
A presentation was made by CCC HPC Center Director, Tom Murphy, to two classes of
Street Tech students. Paul Lamb, Executive Director of Street Tech, is a member
of the HPC Advisory Board at Contra Costa College. Street Tech is committed to
bridging the "digital divide" by offering an advanced technology and
professional development training program to at-risk and disadvantaged adults.
On both academic and social levels Street Tech is compatible with the HPC
program. The HPC program extends the A+ knowledge provided there via the HPC
program. Street Tech offers an immersion program meeting three hours every
evening for several months to help individuals gain both technical knowledge
and business socialization skills. The HPC program offers the traditional
classroom environment.
The 25 Street Tech students were extraordinary both in terms of their
enthusiasm and their knowledge. Several attendees are planning to enroll in the
fall HPC courses.
Summer 2004 FaST Internship at LBNL: June 7 through August 20, 2004
Linux and HPC introductory topics were be the area of focus of the 2004 team. The team is composed of Tom Murphy who is the faculty leader. The student team members were Martin Robel, Adam Barlev, and Bassam Aldabari. They were joined by Ben Rosenberg, a high school student from Hayward High. More info about this project is in the summer 2004 Faculty Student TeamFaST internship area.
Two Day Parallel Computing Workshop presented in conjunction with the National Computational Science Institute: June 7-8, 2004
Bob Panoff and Dave Joiner of the National Science Institute led a two
day Parallel Programming workshop at Contra Costa College for 33 people, mostly
community college teachers. Part of the workshop introduced them to Paul Gray’s
Bootable Cluster CD in which they were trained. There was interest in the BCCD
lab exercises CCC HPC Center Director, Tom Murphy, prepared later that summer at LBL with
three of his CCC student interns, and one High School student from Hayward High.
Second National HPC Conference
June 9, 2004
The conference, held at CCC, had three track afternoon agenda(pdf file) and a single track morning plenary session composed of an engaging keynote address from Bob Panoff of Shodor. Randy Nelson from Pixar dazzled the crowd with Pixar stories and movie clips, making it clear how 65 computer years of animation was compressed into a much shorter time via HPC. Anu Chakicherla and Tim Harsch, both from Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, gave a great perspective of the role of HPC in Bioinformatics.
Renewal of the NCEHPCT Grant for a Third Year: July 8, 2004
Parallel Programming Workshop at Oklahoma University: August 7-14, 2004
The National Computational Science Institute held a seven day parallel programming workshop for college science instructors. It was presented by Dr. Dave Joiner (NCSI), Dr. Paul Gray (NCSI and University of Northern Iowa), Dr. Henry Neeman (Director of Oklahoma University Supercomputing Center for Education & Research), Charlie Peck (Earlham College), and RETC Director Tom Murphy.
This same group is presenting a High End Computational Science Education mini-symposium at the February SIAM Conference on Computational Science & Engineering. Henry is presenting "Supercomputing in Plain English." Paul is presenting "HPC Issues in the Undergraduate Curricula." Tom is presenting "Fostering Computational Science Infrastructure via Cluster Administrator Training." Charlie is presenting "Design for an Upper-level Undergraduate Interdisciplinary Computational Science Course in a Liberal Arts Context."
State of California approved CCC to award both an HPC AS degree and an HPC certificate of completion: September 29, 2004
On September 29, 2004, the State of California approved CCC to award both an HPC AS degree and an HPC certificate of completion.
ATE PI Conference: October 13-15, 2004
This annual conference was again held at the Omni Shoreham in Washington, DC. It was a good conference to talk with people from other NSF sponsored projects.
Advisory Board: October 29, 2004
This advisory board meeting further retargeted the HPC curriculum. The HPC programming track was removed. The separate HPC Network Administrator and HPC Security Administrator courses were combined with the HPC System Administrator course. The nature of the internship program was clarified through A lot of good brainstorming about
SuperComputing 2004: November 6-12, 2004 in Pittsburg, Pennsylvania
On November 9, RETC Director Tom Murphy ran a Birds of a Feather session on "High Performance Computing in the Community Colleges". It was equally attended by members of people from our National Center of Excellence in HPC, people Tom is working with on a National Center of Excellence in Computational Science, and interested others. It was a good session talking of many topics. Paul Gray and I demonstrated "Little Fe", a cluster in a box.
There was a great planning session with the Computational Science ATE folk. A year long planning grant is pending NSF approval. This ATE will be a great partner with our HPC ATE. It will focus on training people to comprehend scientific algorithms, the basics of specific scientific fields and thus be capable of writing and maintaining the scientific computer programs needed with specific disciplines. There is no overlap with our course content, yet it would provide a good learning pathway for our students. Further, it will provide a further reason for schools to acquire HPC computational facilities.
Richmond High HPC Presentation: November 29, 2004
RETC Director Tom Murphy presented an HPC and HPC technology program overview to over 200 students in Richmond High's little theater. CCC Counselor Maritza Vande Voorde provided general information about the community college and info on how to concurrently enroll at CCC.
CCC Counselor Update: December 1, 2004
The purpose of this meeting was to report on the first semester of the program to the nine CCC counselors, specifically a refined student profile leading to success with the HPC technician program. It was also an opportunity to provide the counselors with four different kinds of HPC marketing materials.
Facility with Math and familiarity with PCs was already known. Through the course of the first semester it became clear that a student needs to be able to maintain their own PC. That was the greatest predictor of success and failure. The students which had others maintain their equipment were not able to keep up with the pace of the class. An additional success factor was will. This is a bit hard to quantify. The course of studies is hard an requires a student to take responsibility of their own learning. The younger students attempting the course did not always have quality and thus chose to avoid the necessary reading and homework and fell far behind in the course. 90% of the class was adults who had the desire to learn. All HPC courses were thus able to proceed at an appropriate pace.
The counselors will continue to provide HPC material in the new student packets they hand out.
Pinole Valley High School HPC Presentation: December 2, 2004
RETC Director Tom Murphy presented an HPC and HPC technology program overview to 24 students from the Computer Science class at Pinole Valley High School. CCC Counselor Maritza Vande Voorde provided general information about the community college and info on how to concurrently enroll at CCC.
De Anza High School HPC Presentation: December 10, 2004
RETC Director Tom Murphy presented an HPC and HPC technology program overview to 32 students from the Computer Science class at De Anza High School. CCC Counselor Maritza Vande Voorde provided general information about the community college and info on how to concurrently enroll at CCC.
Meeting with the West Contra Costa Unified School District Superintendent of Secondary Education: January 7, 2005
RETC Director Tom Murphy met with Dr. Howard Cohen, the Superintendent of Secondary Education for West Contra County Unified School District to discuss details of the Districts support for the NSF ITEST grant (http://www.nsf.gov/pubs/2004/nsf04611/nsf04611.htm) for which Tom Murphy will be the Principal Investigator (NSF grant proposal 0505405). Dr. Cohen asked Tom to help with his Strategic Alignment Process by serving on the West Contra Costa School District Content Lead Committee. This committee will help the West County curricula reflect relevant parts of the community college curricula, as well as fostering relationships which will lead to 2+2 agreements for the HPC project
RETC Director Tom Murphy's ITEST grant will create an after school, weekend and summer robotics curriculum for all middle and high schools of the high school district as a way of fostering STEM skills (Science, Technology, Engineering and Math.) The grant will also fund recruitment, training and support of a robotics coach at each school. It is a $300K/year grant which will run for three years. This effort is extremely complementary to the HPC technology training effort. The 2+2 agreements are needed formalized pathways between schools. This robotics program should provide a pathway of interest for students to enter the HPC program. It may provide a good model for similar programs in other areas to help HPC pathways from High Schools to Community Colleges.
School to Career Symposium: January 12, 2005
| High School | Female | Male | Total |
|---|
| Richmond | 12 | 16 | 28 |
| Pinole Valley | 10 | 14 | 24 |
| Hercules | 5 | 18 | 23 |
| Kennedy | 4 | 10 | 14 |
| El Cerrito | 13 | 18 | 31 |
| De Anza | 18 | 29 | 47 |
| Kappa | 9 | 4 | 13 |
| Delta | 3 | 3 | 6 |
| Middle College | 40 | 34 | 74 |
| Total | 114 | 146 | 260 |
|---|
Contra Costa Community College District Computer Disciplines Meeting: January 13, 2005
Twenty three faculty members, division deans and college vice-presidents attended an all day meeting to discuss the academic issues facing the computer related disciplines of the three colleges and one satellite campus of the Contra Costa Community College District. RETC Director Tom Murphy attended both as a Computer Science faculty member and as Director of the HPC technology program.
The morning was spent discussing the nature and issues of the various programs and departments. Representatives of several local computer focused businesses then gave feedback and perspective from what they heard.
The afternoon was spent prioritizing issues. As entire group, we agreed to have a similar all-day meeting just before each semester. We also formed a steering committee composed of department and program chairs from each college, as well as their division deans. This group will meet in February to discuss the three key issues: forming a cross college advisory board(s), identifying common courses so students can be directed from a cancelled course to one in another district college, common marketing of the computer programs. These issues will hopefully naturally lead into intercollege articulation of courses, which will help the CCC HPC program be available to more students.
HPC Focused Tech Prep Grant submitted: January 19, 2005
Priscilla Leadon, Dean of Economic Development for Contra Costa College, headed a team, which included RETC Director Tom Murphy, to prepare and submit a $200K Tech Prep grant to foster high students to more smoothly transition to the CCC HPC program. Specifically, it will fund a part time researcher to approach business to seek internship positions for HPC students and will fund development of short courses to help fill in prerequisite knowledge and skills of HS students seeking entry into the HPC program.
CI-TEAM: Scalable Cyberinfrastructure for Bioinformatics and Beyond: March 11, 2005
RETC Director Tom Murphy is a member if the CI-Team and one of the key project personel of this NSF Shared Cyberinfrastructure (SCI) grant.
This project will establish CyberInfrastructure (CI) statewide across an EPSCoR state (Oklahoma), regionally
among several EPSCoR and non-EPSCoR states, and nationally, targeted initially at scalable bioinformatics
education and research efforts, but also accessible and applicable to education and research across
all science and engineering disciplines. The University of Oklahoma (OU), specifically the OU Supercomputing
Center for Education & Research (OSCER), will lead this project; OU is already deploying precisely
this kind of CI, funded entirely through OU’s internal core budget, and therefore the bulk of the CI-TEAM
project budget will be spent on the other participating institutions. Participants will come not only from 13
departments at OU, but also from a variety of other academic institutions in several states.
By leveraging existing CI and bioinformatics software technologies, specifically Condor
SIAM Conference on Computational Science & Engineering: February 12-15, 2005
RETC Director Tom Murphy presented the paper "Fostering Computational Science Infrastructure via Cluster Administrator Training" as part of the High End Computational Science Education mini-symposium. As part of the same minisymposium, Henry Neeman and Julia Mullen presented "Supercomputing in Plain English", and Paul Gray presented "HPC Issues in the Undergraduate Curricula"
Women and Careers in Computing Technology HPC Focus Group: June 2, 2005
The purpose of this focus group was to learn how to help women with the high paying jobs available in High Computing Technology. We sought to learn:
- What is it that blocks women from considering careers in Computing technology?
- What will make a program like HPC attractive to women?
- What makes seeking an HPC Associate Degree difficult
- What can be done to overcome the difficulties?
Results of the survey were compiled.
Lawrence Berkeley National Lab wrote an excellent article highlighting the women from LBNL who helped facilitate the focus group.
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The National Computational Science Institute again held a seven day parallel programming workshop for college science instructors. It was presented by same group as last year: Dr. Dave Joiner (Kean University), Dr. Paul Gray (University of Northern Iowa), Dr. Henry Neeman (Director of Oklahoma University Supercomputing Center for Education & Research), Charlie Peck (Earlham College), and RETC Director Tom Murphy. The picture shows a photo of the presenters with the attendees from Oklahoma University (Back row: Dave, Tom, Paul, Charlie; Front row: Henry is second from left.)
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The group attending was a diverse group both in terms of disciplines and colleges.
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The purpose of this Boot Camp is to train local
middle and high school teachers to:
- Become comfortable using the new RadioShack Vex robotics
platform
- Learn techniques to help form a local team
- Prepare for competition at CCC in Fall 2005
- Form an educational clan, a group focused on advancing
science and technology
education in West Contra Costa County via a coordinated
collaboration of middle school, high school, community
college, and university faculty.
HPCwire Article published "New Directions for Computational Science Education ": August 25, 2005
The CCC Advisory Board, amid much good debate and discussion, reworked the draft skill standards to better reflect the tasks required by an Linux cluster administrator. Two Linux cluster administrators who are also Board Members were present. A manager of administrators was also present. The CCC review will be used as info for the upcoming National DACUM effort.
HPCwire Article published "Little-Fe: a Portable Educational Cluster": October 19, 2005
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| Paul and Tom watch Harry put the BCCD through its paces as he prepares to take it to show others at NSF |
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| Version 3 of Little-Fe showcased at the NSF ATE booth |
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RETC Director Tom Murphy, in conjunction with Paul Gray and Charlie Peck, presented two talks: "Little Fe: A Portable HPC Cluster-in-a-Box" and "Spanning HPC Technician Training and Computational Science Education" at the League for Innovation Conference. They also had the opportunity to demonstrate Little-Fe and the Bootable Cluster CD to the acting Lead Program Director for the Advanced Technological Education (ATE) program in the Division of Undergraduate Education, Harry Ungar.
Krell UCES Honorable Mention: November 15, 2005
The Krell Undergraduate Computational Engineering and Sciences (UCES) Honorable Mention was awarded to RETC Director Tom Murphy, for his promotion and enhancement of undergraduate education in Computational Engineering and Science (CES) through the development of a portable, eight-node cluster system suitable for teaching scientific computing and high-performance computer systems programming.
Paul Gray of the University of Northern Iowa, David Joiner of Kean University, Charlie Peck of Earlham College, and RETC Director Tom Murphy submitted a phase II NSF Course, Curriculum, and Laboratory Improvement (CCLI) proposal to extend the reach and amplify the impact of
a proven, effective team of the PIs of this grant via a comprehensive
and sound framework for undergraduate computational science educational materials,
driven by the capabilities of high performance computing (HPC) resources, which will extend
and refine the author’s five-year history of developing similar materials. This project
will achieve these goals by performing the following concrete tasks:
- Organize existing HPC workshop curriculum into a hardcopy textbook and workbook
form ultimately realized both as classroom texts and in online media with downloadable
components compatible with the text and exercises of the hardcopy version.
- Augment the online aspects of deliverables with metadata content suitable for integration
with the National Science Digital Library (NDSL).
- Tailor the Bootable Cluster CD (BCCD) to enhance scaffolding for education, via
downloadable education modules integrated with the existing tools of the BCCD.
- Extend the existing body of NCSI workshop curricular exercises to include further
science demonstrations built around open source research codes.
- Produce portable, maintainable, and cost-effective parallel computing environments for
education purposes ("Little-Fe") in larger numbers for classroom use. The ongoing
target cost will be that of a laptop computer, approximately $2500.
- Build a web-based interface to open source research codes thus providing alternative
computational resources for faculty without in-class access to a PC lab or a Little-Fe.
- Provide workshops accessible to students and faculty to both use the extended curriculum,
as well as to create new curriculum.
David Joiner of Kean University, Charlie Peck of Earlham College, Paul Gray of the University of Northern Iowa, and RETC Director Tom Murphy submitted a bold proposal to the NSF, via a Major Research Infrastructure (MRI) grant proposal, to create a research quality supercomputer. They expect Big-FE to be on the top 100 list of the world's most powerful computer centers. |
