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Session Number 1526

Enhancement of Computational Engineering within an Undergraduate Mechanical Engineering Curriculum

Robert Spall, Thomas Hauser Utah State University

Abstract

The NSF supported Course, Curriculum and Laboratory Initiative (CCLI) project described herein addresses concerns regarding undergraduate education at research universities as high- 1 lighted in the 1998 Boyer Commission Report by incorporating advances in information tech- nology into the curriculum. This has been accomplished by developing an “emphasis” to the department’s undergraduate mechanical engineering degree in the area of computational engi- neering. To complete the emphasis, students need to complete four upper division elective courses related to computational engineering. Three courses concentrate on applied modeling and simula- tion; the fourth (which was developed under the CCLI award) concentrates on implementing algorithms on parallel computing architectures.

To support the emphasis, the authors have designed and assembled a PC Beowulf teaching cluster. The cluster consists of a server node where students can log in and develop their programs, as well 10 dual Opteron compute nodes for running and testing parallel codes. AMD Opteron CPUs were selected for the cluster since they may be used to teach both shared and distributed memory programming techniques, and for their strong price/performance ratio. Using gigabit networking technology, the cluster was built at a cost of approximately $15k.

In addition to traditional coursework, a cluster computing workshop was developed and offered for the first time during the summer of 2004. Key issues covered were designing a Beowulf clus- ter, implementing and programming a cluster, and tuning/profiling of programs.

1. Introduction

In 1998, the Boyer Commission released a report on educating undergraduates in research univer- sities titled “Reinventing Undergraduate Education: A Blueprint for America’s Research Univer- sities” 1 . The report points out that while only 3% of all higher education institutions are classified as Carnegie I and II research universities (since reclassified as Doctoral/Research Uni- versity Extensive), these universities confer 32% of all undergraduate degrees. Furthermore, these universities also confer 56% of all baccalaureate degrees earned by recent recipients of doctorates

Proceedings of the 2005 American Society for Engineering Education Annual Conference & Exposition Copyright © 2005, American Society for Engineering Education

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Hauser, T., & Spall, R. (2005, June), Enhancement Of Computational Engineering Within An Undergraduate Mechanical Engineering Curriculum Paper presented at 2005 Annual Conference, Portland, Oregon. 10.18260/1-2--15121