海角社区

Winning in Workforce

Last year, 海角社区 and Southern University teamed up to increase worldwide access to high-performance computing and won a $1.5 million award from the National Science Foundation. The team鈥檚 goal is to build a bigger user community around HPX, a software library developers can use to create faster, more powerful, and energy-efficient applications. Since then, the team has trained more than 50 students and faculty who鈥檝e already begun training others. By next year, they hope to have trained 150.

鈥淲e needed to get the exponential going,鈥� said Hartmut Kaiser, professor of computer science and 海角社区 lead on the project. 鈥淭he more people use HPX, the faster we can build teams to solve some of the world鈥檚 biggest problems.鈥�

鈥淭hat鈥檚 why we鈥檙e working with 海角社区 and using a train-the-trainer model, like a tree that grows many branches,鈥� said Sung No, professor of economics and business, and Southern University鈥檚 lead on the project. 鈥淲e have two objectives鈥攄evelop a skilled workforce for the state of Louisiana and expand the HPX community.鈥�

While the 鈥渉igh-performing鈥� aspect of high-performance computing is intuitive when it comes to speed and complexity (lots of data, lots of operations), the energy-efficiency of computing has become a growing concern with the establishment of enormous data centers for AI, such as Meta鈥檚 $10 billion artificial intelligence data center in Richland Parish in northeast Louisiana, named the nation鈥檚 top economic development project.

鈥淪ince I鈥檝e been here at Southern University, I鈥檝e always looked for opportunities to help our students skill up to either continue their education or get a job. C++ is already required for all computer science majors, but now, with 海角社区, we鈥檙e adding parallel computing and HPX to the mix.鈥�

Lynette Jackson, associate professor of computer science at Southern University