Grants, Awards, Opportunities

Currently, the EAPF is announcing the following grant and award opportunities:
EAPF Grants
LittleFe Buildout Events

EAPF Grants

Apply for the EAPF grant here

EAPF is committed to promoting the dissemination of materials and speeding the integration of parallel programming concepts into the classroom. EAPF Grants will support the sharing of materials, experience, and expertise. With typical funding amounts ranging from $750 to $2000, EAPF grants directly fund the proposer, or team of applicants, rather than any institution.

Grants are intended to enable:

  • Creation of class room resources for introducing parallelism into existing CS curriculum
  • Conversion of existing course material into a stand-alone polished form
  • Filling of curriculum gaps
  • Provision of parallel examples to widely used text books
  • Production of short supplementary materials suitable for electronic self-publishing

Proposals should include planned outcomes, what resources will be required to produce those planned outcomes, and an argument for likelihood of success in producing planned outcomes based on past successes, experience, and/or compelling detailed execution plan.

Upon project completion the EAPF will expect an final outcome assessment report including: project outcome, project materials for dissemination, and future plans for extensions of the project.

Judging criteria will favor proposals yielding the highest likelihood of portable and scalable results, impacting the widest range of educational niches. The initial focus is on undergraduate curriculum, but novel secondary or graduate education proposals are welcome.

Grants will be judged by an expert panel drawn from EAPF members, as well as established experts in the field.*

Example topics or situations:

  1. I have some parallel programming course material that needs work before it will make sense to anyone else, or be usable outside my course
  2. I have an idea for a parallel programming project based learning activity that will cut across my courses and I want to hire some students to help test ideas and develop it
  3. Show how you would use a parallel library as a substitute for a serial library within a current assignment. Contribute a foil set that explains difference in implementation and ramifications for scaling across differing data sets and platforms.
  4. Describe a way a challenge your students to find ways to scale beyond four cores.
  5. Describe a queue data structure and review the problems that are inherent in using a shared queue data structure in a parallel setting. Provide a classroom exercise or homework assignment.

Awards will be given on a semi-annual period (April and October).

Apply Here

* Members of EAPF and those involved in evaluating and judging will not be eligible for EAPF grants within the round of evaluations on which they serve. All material generated as a result of grant funding will be done under Creative Commons, GPL, or similar appropriate licenses to be approved in advance by the EAPF. All material will be made available for the teaching community on the EAPF, ACM Tech Pack and member sites of EAPF, as appropriate.

LittleFe Buildout Events

Apply for a FREE LittleFe mini-cluster for your College or University to use for teaching parallel programming, cluster computing and/or computational and data-enabled science & engineering to your students and colleagues!

Applications are no longer accepted, but you can still learn more about the events here.

There are two buildout events scheduled for 2011, one in July as part of the intermediate parallel programming and cluster computing workshop at the University of Oklahoma, the second in November as part of the Education Program at the SC11 Supercomputing Conference in Seattle, WA.

About LittleFe

LittleFe is a portable mini-cluster which is small enough to fit in a shipping case, light enough to easily move between classrooms, and travels as standard checked baggage to conferences and workshops.

LittleFe's primary focus is turnkey classroom demonstrations of, and exercises in, High Performance Computing (HPC), parallel programming, and Computational/Data Enabled Science and Engineering (CDESE). LittleFe supports shared memory, distributed memory, and GPGPU parallelism.

LittleFe's secondary focus is as a production HPC resource for small institutions that aren't yet able to afford or support a full scale cluster; in fact, LittleFe can be used as a gateway to, and development platform for, full scale HPC resources.

Read the full LittleFe 2011 buildout event announcement, including information on what the buildouts entail here.