NCSA NEWS

SC Minority Participation Project Brings New Faces to SC2000

released November 7, 2000

Faculty and staff members from Minority Serving Institutions (MSIs) will attend SC2000 thanks to a grant provided by the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, (IEEE) and the Association for Computing Machinery, the two sponsors of the conference.

Through a program called the SC Minority Participation Project, IEEE and ACM will provide up to $60,000 a year for the next two years to send MSI faculty and technical staff to SC2000 in Dallas and to SC2001 in Denver. The award was granted to the Advanced Networking with Minority Serving Institutions (AN-MSI) project, an effort funded by the National Science Foundation aimed at encouraging MSIs to incorporate the benefits of high-speed collaborative networks—such as the Access Grid—into their curriculums. The AN-MSI project is part of a four-year, $6 million program led by EDUCAUSE, a non-profit association that works to transform education through information technologies. The AN-MSI project is also part of NSF's Education, Outreach and Training Partnership for Advanced Computational Infrastructure (EOT-PACI).

The participants in this year's SC Minority Participation Project come from a variety of MSIs, including Hispanic Serving Institutions, Tribal Colleges, and Historically Black Colleges and Universities. According to Allison Clark, program director of Access and Inclusion Initiatives for the National Computational Science Alliance (Alliance), the project will give MSI faculty and staff a better awareness of, and access to, the nation's growing advanced computational infrastructure.

"Minority groups are severely underrepresented in high-performance computing and engineering," said Clark. "A first step in alleviating this imbalance is to get MSI faculty and IT staff out to the supercomputing conference. Beyond that, we hope to continue to foster collaborative relationships among MSI faculty and IT professionals and research scientists at major research centers. These kinds of collaborations are the key to quality computational science education at MSIs and to attracting more minority students to these fields."

Participants in the SC Minority Participation Project will hold a "virtual rap session" over the Access Grid at 11 a.m. Tuesday, Nov. 7. The MSI faculty will participate in the talk in the Alliance research booth (R804), the Boston University booth (R892) and the Argonne National Laboratory booth (R186)on the SC show floor. Others will participate remotely through Access Grid nodes at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications, Boston University, and the San Diego Supercomputer Center. The grant recipients will also meet for a Birds-of-a-Feather on Tuesday, Nov. 7, from 6 - 7 p.m.

For more information on the AN-MSI, project see http://www.ncsa.uiuc.edu/AccessInclusion/ or the AN-MSI website at http://www.anmsi.org/.

 

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