Structuring the course in this way provided several benefits to the participating institutions. The nature of their experience varied based on the status of HPC and parallel computing courses within their curriculum. Based on conversations with the participating faculty these are the variety of benefits that they derived from their participation:
- One institution is in the process of starting a minor program in computational science. The course helped them to accelerate their implementation of the program on their campus. They also indicated that they would be willing to participate in a wider ranging collaborative course program offering multiple courses.
- Several institutions indicated that the collaborative model allowed them to offer parallel computing and HPC experience for their students for the first time in several years.
- Several institutions offered a course of this nature for the first time, allowing faculty to learn about the breadth of parallel computing techniques and providing a first experience with HPC for their students.
- Several institutions were able to offer the course to their students in small numbers that would otherwise not meet institutional enrollment requirements for course offerings.
- All participants were able to use the XSEDE infrastructure which allowed instruction to include a variety of different parallel computing techiques associated with different combinations of modern HPC hardware including multi- and many-core processing.