CESNET2 Providing Students from Brno with Access to a Unique Supercomputing Course

With CESNET2, the national research and education network, students of the Faculty of Informatics of the Masaryk University in Brno have a chance to take part in a single-semester course in the area of supercomputing systems, organized in cooperation with Louisiana State University (LSU) in Baton Rouge, USA. The course employs both live and recorded high-definition multimedia over high-speed networks with the complementary independent work of students.

The course is taught concurrently in Baton Rouge as well as other places in the USA, using the multimedia delivery technology. Students of the Faculty of Informatics in Brno have a chance to experience the American way of premium university education, including the opportunity to get a comparison with their American peers. All the hands-on work, homework and examinations will be the same in the USA and Brno.

The course is taught by Professor Thomas Sterling, a world-renowned specialist in high-performance computing architectures and the inventor of the Beowulf cluster. In addition to the universities in Louisiana and Brno, the project members include the Louisiana Institute of Technology, Arkansas University and Micro-Electronic Center in North Carolina. "These institutions have been chosen as they have access to the high-speed networks needed to transfer the lectures. In addition, there are supercomputing experts at each of these institutions, who can assist in the teaching if needed," Professor Sterling says in explaining the selection of member institutions.

It is the quality of the network that is crucial for implementation of the international course. The CESNET academic association has provided Masaryk University with a special line connecting Prague and Chicago, with a capacity of 10 Gbps; connection from Chicago to Louisiana is ensured on the American side. The connection and video quality make this project totally unique in the domestic environment. The project gives the students the feeling that when listening to the lectures, they are actually sitting directly in classrooms in the USA. "As a small country, we can't offer large supercomputers. However, the knowledge of supercomputing technologies furnishes our alumni who often work abroad with a huge advantage on the job market," says assoc. prof. Luděk Matyska from the Masaryk University. "We have been cooperating with the Louisiana University for several years in the area of HD video transfer using high-speed networks. Now we have decided to utilize our experience to support supercomputing at the Masaryk University." In cooperation with the Masaryk University, CESNET provided also basic technologies for capturing and transferring HD video, which are used throughout the project.

The course is targeted at master's and Ph.D. level students of the Faculty of Informatics of the Masaryk University. The course is interdisciplinary, combining critical elements of hardware technology and architecture, system software and tools, and programming models and application algorithms with the cross-cutting theme of performance management and measurement. The course is hands-on, with strong educational reinforcement through experimental exercises and quantifiable metrics. It features extensive supplementary material and a new textbook will be developed during the course. The local tutor is assoc. prof. Ludek Matyska with the assistance of dr. Eva Hladka and dr. Petr Holub and a large number of students working at the Laboratory of Advanced Network Technologies collectively operated by the Masaryk University and CESNET.

The CESNET association was founded by universities and the Academy of Sciences of the Czech Republic. The association is currently financed mainly from the resources of the governmental Committee for Research and Education and the resources of the members of the association. The association deals with the research and development of information and communication technologies, building and developing the national gigabit optical network, CESNET2, designed for research and educational purposes. With its research activities and accomplishments, the CESNET association can represent the Czech Republic in the pan-European GÉANT2 network construction project as well as other international projects.