LSU and Southern University Team Up to Train 150 Louisianans to Lead in Energy-Efficient Computing

Winning in Workforce

Last year, LSU and Southern University teamed up to increase worldwide access to high-performance computing and won a $1.5 million award from the National Science Foundation. The team’s goal is to build a bigger user community around HPX, a software library developers can use to create faster, more powerful, and energy-efficient applications. Since then, the team has trained more than 50 students and faculty who’ve already begun training others. By next year, they hope to have trained 150.

“We needed to get the exponential going,” said Hartmut Kaiser, professor of computer science and LSU lead on the project. “The more people use HPX, the faster we can build teams to solve some of the world’s biggest problems.”

“That’s why we’re working with LSU and using a train-the-trainer model, like a tree that grows many branches,” said Sung No, professor of economics and business, and Southern University’s lead on the project. “We have two objectives—develop a skilled workforce for the state of Louisiana and expand the HPX community.”

While the “high-performing” aspect of high-performance computing is intuitive when it comes to speed and complexity (lots of data, lots of operations), the energy-efficiency of computing has become a growing concern with the establishment of enormous data centers for AI, such as Meta’s $10 billion artificial intelligence data center in Richland Parish in northeast Louisiana, named the nation’s top economic development project.

“Since I’ve been here at Southern University, I’ve always looked for opportunities to help our students skill up to either continue their education or get a job. C++ is already required for all computer science majors, but now, with LSU, we’re adding parallel computing and HPX to the mix.”

Lynette Jackson, associate professor of computer science at Southern University