Waco High School Students Awarded Small Super

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Deep in the heart of Texas, six La Vega High School students have been awarded a small desktop supercomputing system courtesy of Texas State Technical College [TSTC].  The six students, Dwight Holder, Aaron Leija, David Mullins, Shekaylan Pettis, Kadeshah Proctor and Dallas Smith, attended a Supercomputing Summer Camp at TSTC last summer.  The students’ outstanding performance on quizzes and other activities earned them a shiny new machine for their high school.

“They’ve all been really excited, asking me, ‘When is it coming?’ ” said a La Vega High library assistant who was watching the presentation. “I just kept telling them, ‘Don’t worry, it’s coming.’ ”

Yantis [head of TSTC’s networking program and the summer Supercomputing Camp] said the supercomputer is available for La Vega High students “to do whatever schoolwork they want. Hopefully, they’ll do research and science.

“With these computers, we’re solving the really big problems, the grand challenges,” he said.

Kudos to TSTC for hosting such a program for burgeoning young scientists.  For more info, read the full article here.

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Comments

  1. I think this is great! Love to see High School kids getting involved and having fun.

    I talked to some of the teams for the Cluster Challenge at SC09 – great groups of people. They are smart, savy, and driven – all the things we need in the HPC community.

    BTW – a somewhat related topic… LSU ran a program for at risk high school kids in the summer. They would bring in the kids who would assemble the nodes, assemble the cluster, install the software, and then build and run applications on it (maybe even a little programming). The assembled cluster would go to a high school of one of the kids who participated. I think this is an uber-cool idea that every university should be doing. LSU may still be doing this (it’s been a few years since I was there so I don’t know the status).

    Jeff

  2. Jeff, I agree completely! We, as industry folk, need to do a better job in getting the young minds of tomorrow excited about science and its respective applications. On your note about LSU, they do still have the summer program going. Check it out:
    http://insidehpc.com/2009/06/10/lsu-hosts-beowulf-boot-camp/