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Education and outreach

Welcome to FutureGrid's Training, Education and Outreach Services (TEOS)

FutureGrid education and broader outreach activities include the dissemination of curricular materials on the use of FutureGrid, pre-packaged FutureGrid virtual machines configured for particular course modules, and educational modules based on virtual appliance networks and social networking technologies that will focus on education in networking, parallel computing, virtualization and distributed computing. A goal of FutureGrid is to advance education and training in distributed computing at academic institutions with less diverse computational resources, through the development of instructional resources that include preconfigured environments that provide students with sandboxed virtual clusters. These can be used for teaching courses in parallel, cloud, and grid computing. Such resources will also provide academic institutions with an opportunity to easily experiment with cloud technology to see if such technology can enhance their campus resources.

Leveraging cloud computing for education and training 

FutureGrid provides unique capabilities that enable researchers to deploy customized environments for their experiments. A key enabling technology for this is virtualization and the provisioning of Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) through cloud computing middleware.

FutureGrid's TEOS leverage these capabilities to create self-contained, flexible, plug-and-play educational "virtual appliances" that serve as a basis for the creation of hands-on educational modules that are easy to share, reproduce and instantiate - on FutureGrid resources, cloud resources, or a user's local resources.

A community resource for sharing educational modules

There is a growing number of educators that have embraced the use of virtualization as a means of supporting executable environments for hands-on education and training. A goal of FutureGrid TEOS is to become a growing repository of appliance-based modules used in training and education across a variety of topics, including parallel programming, grid/cloud middleware, and high-performance computing applications. As such, we encourage educators to contribute educational modules and associated documentation to the repository. The benefits of doing this include the ability of leveraging FutureGrid's unique cloud/IaaS hardware capabilities to swiftly deploy educational environments, and the visibility and feedback from the community.

Technologies leveraged and initial FutureGrid educational modules

FutureGrid leverages technologies contributed by its partners and by the open-source community in the packaging, configuration, and deployment of virtual clusters - including the plug-and-play, self-configuring Grid appliance, the Nimbus science cloud middleware,  the IPOP/GroupVPN self-configuring virtual network, and the ViNe virtual network.

The initial appliance-based FutureGrid tutorials that leverage these technologies are listed below. You will also find tutorial videos on the use of the appliances on the Grid appliance YouTube channel.

How can I get involved?

As FutureGrid ramps up, we would like to work with early adopters interested in using the infrastructure in education and training. Please contact the TEOS committee chair (renato at acis dot ufl dot edu) if you are interested in participating.

 

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