WEST LAFAYETTE, Ind. — Purdue University is accepting applications from high school teachers, guidance counselors and students for a summer program that focuses on ways to attract girls to computer-related careers.

Surprising Possibilities Imagined and Realized Through Information Technology, aka “SPIRIT”, will be held in July on the Purdue main campus in West Lafayette, Indiana.

The program for teachers is July 18-30, the program for counselors is July 25-30, and the program for students is July 26-30. The application deadline for all three workshops is Feb. 15.

The student program is open to girls and boys who are currently in grades 8-11. The teacher program is open to teachers of students in ninth through 12th grades. Teachers, counselors and students who took part in past SPIRIT programs are not eligible to participate this year.

Alka Harriger, SPIRIT director, professor and assistant head of the Department of Computer and Information Technology, said the program’s goal is to encourage young women to pursue computing careers, including in information technology, computer science, network engineering and technology support.

“The focus of SPIRIT is on educating high school teachers and counselors — those who have a direct influence on students’ career choices — about the wide variety of career options in those fields,” she said. “We also spend a good amount of time demonstrating how those in computer-related careers can have a positive impact on society, which is a message that resonates with young women.”

SPIRIT, funded by a $1.26 million, three-year National Science Foundation grant, is in its third year.

All participants receive a daily stipend for their participation and will stay in air-conditioned residence halls for free.

Upon completion of the workshop, teachers will be expected to use what they have learned to enhance instruction in their own classrooms. They also will receive technical and design support, software, textbooks and sample lesson plans.

In addition, teachers and counselors can apply for graduate course credit, certification renewal units or continuing education units upon the successful completion of the SPIRIT program. Partial travel support also will be available to teachers who present their work at teacher conferences.

Students attending the program complete a variety of hands-on activities that are supported by computer technology.

One major focus of the workshops is on Alice, a 3-D, interactive software development tool that helps students better understand programming concepts. It has been used effectively by SPIRIT teachers in a variety of disciplines, including science, technology, engineering, math, English, Spanish and French.

“Alice is a gender-neutral tool and has been shown to be a great equalizer, regardless of a student’s learning ability,” Harriger said. “Alice reaches both gifted students and those who are struggling. The amazing thing is that they all understand the lessons.”

Application forms and more program information can be found on the SPIRIT Web site at http://www.itpossibilities.org

WEST LAFAYETTE, Ind. — Purdue University’s College of Science is inviting parents and children to learn about computer science together through the “Are You Smarter than Your Fifth Grader?” program.

The program, a series of four workshops, offers programming and graphic design activities for students in grades four through six and their parents or guardians. Parent and student pairs will create their own digital world to tell a story and will work with robotics using the ALICE 3D graphic design program and PicoCricket design studio. Participants will be able to keep their PicoCricket Design Kit, valued at $250.

The workshops are 9 a.m. to 1 p.m. on Jan.9, Jan. 23, Feb. 6 and Feb. 20 in the Lawson Computer Science Building.

The program is free, but a $25 deposit is required to register. The $25 will be returned to participants upon completion of all of the workshop sessions. A Motorola Foundation Innovation Generation Grant funds the program.

For more information, go to http://www.cs.purdue.edu/outreach

WEST LAFAYETTE, Ind. — High school female students who like computers or are interested in learning about them are invited to a computer science career day on Oct. 26 at Purdue University in West Lafayette, IN.

The Purdue Women in Computer Science Career Day is 9:15 a.m. to 4 p.m. at the Lawson Computer Science Building.

The program is free, but students need to register at http://outreach.cs.purdue.edu/register. Participants will learn about careers in computer science, meet current students and participate in a computing project.

Parents and guidance counselors are welcome to attend and are invited to a special session while students participate in the computing project.

More information about the program, lodging and hotels in West Lafayette, travel and parking details are available at http://www.cs.purdue.edu/news/10-1-09WICS.htm

The Motorola and Northrop Grumman foundations are supporting this program.

WEST LAFAYETTE, Ind. — The largest supercomputer on a Big Ten campus will be installed at Purdue in a single-day, electronic “barn-raising.”

More than 200 employees will gather May 5 to help build the massive machine, which will be about the size of a semitrailer when installed. It will be the largest Big Ten supercomputer that is not part of a national center.

Purdue’s computer is being built in a single day to keep the university’s science and engineering researchers from facing a lengthy downtime, says Gerry McCartney, vice president for information technology and chief information officer.

“Our staff thought we were insane when we challenged them to build such a big computer in a single day,” McCartney says. “But now there’s real excitement to be a part of this.”

To generate interest on campus, the organizers created a spoof movie trailer called “Installation Day,” which is a take off of the movie “Independence Day.” The video can be seen on YouTube at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wVzThRN4QJI

Supercomputers are ranked by their performance in running a complex benchmarking system. The results of the tests are published twice each year at http://www.top500.org. Purdue’s new supercomputer would rank in the top 40 of the current Top 500 list, which was published in Nov. 2007.

The current campus leader in supercomputing in the Big Ten is Indiana University’s Big Red, which ranks 42nd in the world. (The National Center for Supercomputing Applications’ “Abe” cluster, which is based in Urbana, Ill. and operated by the University of Illinois, offers computing resources to researchers across the nation and is the largest supercomputer installed at a Big Ten university.)

The world’s largest supercomputer is BlueGene/L, which is located at Lawrence Livermore (Calif.) National Laboratory.

The Purdue supercomputer will consist of 812 Dell dual quad-core computer nodes and is predicted to have a peak performance of more than 60 teraflops, which means it could perform more than 60 trillion operations in one second.

Read the full story

WEST LAFAYETTE, Ind. — The largest supercomputer on a Big Ten campus will be installed at Purdue in a single-day, electronic “barn-raising.”

More than 200 employees will gather May 5 to help build the massive machine, which will be about the size of a semitrailer when installed. It will be the largest Big Ten supercomputer that is not part of a national center.

Purdue’s computer is being built in a single day to keep the university’s science and engineering researchers from facing a lengthy downtime, says Gerry McCartney, vice president for information technology and chief information officer.

“Our staff thought we were insane when we challenged them to build such a big computer in a single day,” McCartney says. “But now there’s real excitement to be a part of this.”

To generate interest on campus, the organizers created a spoof movie trailer called “Installation Day,” which is a take off of the movie “Independence Day.” The video can be seen on YouTube at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wVzThRN4QJI

Supercomputers are ranked by their performance in running a complex benchmarking system. The results of the tests are published twice each year at http://www.top500.org. Purdue’s new supercomputer would rank in the top 40 of the current Top 500 list, which was published in Nov. 2007.

The current campus leader in supercomputing in the Big Ten is Indiana University’s Big Red, which ranks 42nd in the world. (The National Center for Supercomputing Applications’ “Abe” cluster, which is based in Urbana, Ill. and operated by the University of Illinois, offers computing resources to researchers across the nation and is the largest supercomputer installed at a Big Ten university.)

The world’s largest supercomputer is BlueGene/L, which is located at Lawrence Livermore (Calif.) National Laboratory.

The Purdue supercomputer will consist of 812 Dell dual quad-core computer nodes and is predicted to have a peak performance of more than 60 teraflops, which means it could perform more than 60 trillion operations in one second.

Read the full story