Contest rules and guidelines  (Page 6/5)

Introduction

This booklet was created to support the 2008-'09 Open Education Cup that was launched during SC08 ( (External Link) ) in Austin, Texas. The Open Education Cup was conceived of and created in an attempt to create awareness and enhance the interest in creating Open Educational Resources (OER) in the area of HPC. We hope that the effort will help the HPC community recognize and embrace the opportunity that OER represents for accelerating workforce development. OER can enable educators, instructors and learners to access a rich set of free online teaching and learning material, hence lowering the barriers to offering education and training programs.

It is critically important that we, as a community, recognize the increasing role of cyberinfrastructure in society. In particular, we must enable a larger fraction of our science and engineering graduates to become familiar with and even master the necessary technical skills to be productive citizens. The Open Education Cup will help create much needed content that can be used by teachers, instructors and learners to become at a minimum HPC literate or, better yet, capable of harnessing complex HPC resources and become expert users and programmers of current and future HPC systems. This is important, whether the objective is to harness the power of a national supercomputer with 100s of thousand of cores, exploit and program “personal supercomputers” with hardware accelerators delivering multi-teraflop capabilities, or program personal laptops that soon will have dozens of processing cores.

The modules included in the booklet you are holding was not meant to represent specific content relevant to HPC, but was assembled in an attempt to demonstrate the power of the OER repository Connexions. This booklet, in addition to being a description of the Open Education Cup serves as a mini tutorial on OER and Connexions and includes a set of sample modules demonstrating of the capabilities of Connexions. The booklet is just a snapshot in time of what was available online. This printed collection was created using QOOP's on-demand publishing process supported by Connexions, at a fraction of the cost of a traditional textbook.