WS-PGRADE/gUSE-Based Science Gateways in Teaching - Science Gateways for Distributed Computing Infrastructures - page 213

courses. These examples include practical cases from a variety of scienti fields

and educational styles. For each case, the educational context and the course
organization are presented, with emphasis on how the respective portal has been
adopted for the practical exercises. A summary of experiences are also reported,
including advantages and dif

c

culties faced for using these gateways in teaching.

16.1 Introduction

WS-PGRADE portals have been extensively used for practical exercises in various
courses and for diverse student pro les and goals. In this chapter we present the

experiences of four organizations that have used WS-PGRADE portals for two
main types of courses where the students (a) learn and exercise the basic concepts
of distributed computing using a WS-PGRADE generic portal installation; and (b)
learn about the usage of an existing data analysis or simulation application that
demands large computing power using a customized portal.
The following cases are presented: grid/distributed computing principles for
information systems students, animations rendering for computer games and
multimedia students, and molecular modeling for life-sciences students from the
University of Westminster (UoW) in London; drug design course at the University
of T Tübingen (UT); neuroimaging data analysis course at the Academic Medical

Center of the University of Amsterdam (AMC); and a massive online open course
(MOOC) about grid computing offered by SURFsara, NL. For each case we present
the context of the teaching, including brief information about the courses and
student pro

ü

les, what we try to achieve with the practical exercises on the portals,
how we did it, and our experience.

16.2 Teaching with the WS-PGRADE Generic Portal

In this section we present the experiences with three courses that have adopted
WS-PGRADE for teaching general distributed computing skills.

16.2.1 Courses at the University of Westminster for Teaching
Applications of Distributed Computing

Enterprise utility computing is a module designed for business information systems,
database systems, and business intelligence and analytics postgraduate students. The
module introduces cluster, grid, and cloud computing, and focuses on the potential
application of these technologies in business and industry. During the tutorials
students use a generic WS-PGRADE gateway to build and execute application