Teaching Condor Grid Computing to Beginning Programming Students

Grid computing is taught at the University of Arkansas, focusing on the development of grid services, the Globus toolkit, and higher-level grid components. An early course, cluster and grid computing, successfully taught Globus materials to advanced undergraduates and beginning graduate students. However, the material assumed advanced knowledge of Java programming and covered networking and basic distributed systems concepts, and was therefore too advanced for beginning programming students. When teaching grid computing to beginners, we must focus on creating and submitting a grid job rather than programming grid services. We also teach grid computing to advanced science and engineering students whose programming skills are similar to those of beginning computer science students