The Teaching and Learning Technology Programme involves the universities of Kent, Cardiff, Southampton, and Queen Mary and Westfield College in a project which addresses the problem of the lack of teaching material to cover courses in high performance computing. These courses form part of undergraduate degree programs in computer science, physics, all branches of engineering, mathematics and electronics.
Currently many universities in the United Kingdom are teaching units on high performance computing in their undergraduate degree programmes. Many more recognize the growing importance of this topic now that the technology has come to prominence and these institutions would welcome assistance in the form of readily available computer based teaching material to get their courses off the ground. In some cases they wish to provide a more comprehensive coverage of the subject area.
The teaching material (which goes under the name of ParTeach) produced by the programme will consist of ten modules of courseware, each corresponding roughly to four hours of teaching material. Delivery of the courseware will be in hypertext format and will link in to examples and code which can be run on networks of PC's, Macintosh computers and from X terminals and on the local parallel processing facilities (an nCUBE2 at Cardiff, transputer networks at Kent and Southampton and an AMT DAP at QMW). The modules will cover material on (i) occam and transputers (Kent), (ii) scientific applications and system support for scientific computation (Southampton), (iii) computer architecture and Fortran 90 (QMW) and (iv) algorithms and paradigms (Cardiff).
Several platforms for presenting hypertext tutorial material were investigated, including hypercard (for the Apple Macintosh) and UnixHelp and DosHelp. The study revealed that although these platforms had certain advantages over HTML documents residing on WWW servers, for example, finer control over display formatting and robust authoring tools, however the ability to make courseware publicly available in an accessible manner was an overriding advantage. Also, the mechanism of web servers provides an added advantage of being able to launch arbitrary processes upon request from a browser. The pilot study conducted at Cardiff discovered that it was possible to allow users of the parallel programming tutorial to launch real applications on the departmental parallel computer, an nCUBE2, and to have the results of the run displayed in the window of their browser. This remote running of real example programs is particularly useful in the demonstration of parallel programming principles, especially when the distribution of such resources is so scarce, and access to the hardware would otherwise be impossible.