To accomplish this goal, we put forward the project HiSchool DiSCo: High
School Distributed Scientific Computing. The idea is to set up a network
of Linux and Windows-powered computers at the participating high schools.
These computers would be used for the dual purposes of teaching high school
students the basics of Linux/Windows administration and scientific computational
methods and as a commodity cluster for high energy physics computations
running FORM with enabled Message
Passing Interface (MPI) or using BOINC software, fully utilizing the potential
of computers.
Even though these computing clusters will be initially used for the symbolic
computations of quantities needed for theoretical interperetation of experiments
performed at Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory (FNAL)
or at CERN (LHC), this "mini-grid"
is easily scalable. With more schools involved in the project, other computational
projects could utilize this network, including projects in chemistry and
biology, thus having a broader impact on the way scientific computing
is done.
A complete description of the project is available here.