The course begins with introductions to the machines and performance measurement. The concepts and tools learned in the early chapters are then applied to solution of numerical problems in molecular dynamics, advection, and tomography. Because no available text covers all of these topics, we have written all of the course materials. These include a series of single-topic tutorials, a laboratory manual, short reference guides, and manuals for the machines and computational tools. Students access the latter two machines via the internet.
Students work through a chapter of the lab manual every week.
In its first three years, our course has attracted juniors, seniors, and first year graduate students majoring in computer science, physics, applied mathematics, and mechanical or aerospace engineering. The only prerequisite is one semester of numerical computation at the undergraduate level. Our course materials are being published by MIT Press and will appear as a textbook this summer. We are presently preparing a publishable version of the laboratory manual. Our materials have been available by anonymous ftp, and courses based on those materials are being offered at other institutions, both research universities and smaller 4-year colleges.