HiPerCiC

HiPerCiC is the High-Performance Computing in the Classroom project. The goal is to build infrastructure and interfaces in order to support scientific computing in courses at St. Olaf.

The goal for Fall 2007 is to build a system to support Prof. John Schade's advanced lab course that enables students to perform inquiries involving Tony Waldschmidt's implementation of Prof. Schade's model of nitrogen flow in a riparian organism.

Our current strategy involves a two-phase cycle that students may perform repeatedly:
 * 1) Use Tony's implementation running on a Beowulf cluster to generate data requested by a student, and store those results in an SQL database.  We will refer to the user interface for this phase as "Page 1", although it may not end up being implemented as a separate page and may even be implicitly requested as part of the next phase.
 * 2) Provide an interface for students to query that database of results interactively, in order to formulate theories and develop new lines of inquiry involving the model.  This interface is "Page 2".

Work in progress

 * Jeremy's mock-up of Pages 1 and 2

Ideas for the HiPerCiC project
&lt;hipercic app="riparian" dataset="..." select="t/30, sum(Nconst), sum(Nresp)" from="riparian_params natural join riparian_results" where="0<=t<5*365 and p_max = 50 and k_p > 1 and log(-k_n*k_rs) > .5        group by t/30" labels="time (months), &amp;Sigma;N&lt;sub&gt;const&lt;/sub&gt; (g/m^3), &amp;Sigma;N&lt;sub&gt;resp&lt;/sub&gt; (g/m^3)" colors="black, red, green" format="jpg" /&gt; The result would be a jpg image file, to be included as part of Page 2.
 * A possible underlying protocol for making a query: