Training, Education and Outreach

 

Welcome to FutureGrid's Training, Education and Outreach

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. One of FutureGrid's primary goals 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 foster the creation 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

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.

Tutorials 

Please visit the tutorials page to learn how to get started with these technologies in FutureGrid. If you are a developer and would like to add a tutorial on FutureGrid, please proceed as follows:

  1. Obtain an account on the FutureGrid Web site that allows you to edit Drupal pages
  2. Create your tutorial as a new page - there are no formal guidelines for the formatting of the page, please refer to the existing tutorials for examples that can be used as templates
  3. Choose an unused label for your tutorial, using two letters and a number that broadly refer to the technology your tutorial covers (e.g. NM for Nimbus, EU for Eucalyptus, GA for Grid Appliance) and a number (for example, TT1)
  4. Set the URL path settings of your tutorial page as tutorials/label (tutorials/TT1)
  5. Contact the TEOS sub-committee chair to request your tutorial listed in the main FutureGrid tutorials index page; you may also add a link to your tutorial directly by editing that page using Drupal, but you should also notify the TEOS sub-committee chair (see contact information below).

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 if you are interested in participating. We would like to hear from you regarding features that FutureGrid can provide in support of education and training. Please take our short anonymous early adopter survey and help us shape support for education and training in FutureGrid.

Contact Information

To contact the TEOS team by email: renato at acis dot ufl dot edu

TEOS mailing list: fg-outreach@futuregrid.org
https://mailman.futuregrid.org/mailman/listinfo/fg-outreach

 

Links to additional related education/training resources