Supercomputer Applications Project #1
OpenGL Graphics and Computer Simulation

by D.W. Hyatt

Goals and Objectives

In this unit the student will:

Internet2 and Imagining the Future

Our school has been invited to become part of a special project to look at the educational benefits of high speed bandwidth, or Internet2. This is the next generation of the Internet where such concepts as Virtual Reality, Tele-Immersion, and Full-Screen Video Conferencing are the norm. We will be participating in this project with five other schools in the United States, and will be developing educational activities that might be appropriate to high speed Internet access. The company sponsoring this project is Advanced Network and Services, the same company that sponsored ThinkQuest, the high school Internet contest.

The first objective in this project is Team Building and Project Formulation. In other words, students must organize a team and then formulate a project idea that ties in with the educational objectives of Supercomputer Applications. The students from TJ are strongly encouraged to collaborate with students from the other participating schools. A number of students who took Supercomputer Applications in the Fall Semester 2001 will be continuing with a special project class during 7th Period so that they may participate more easily. The deadline for team formation is February 12, 2002 and project submission is set for May 15, 2002.

Our students will need to get a My ThinkQuest account on the ThinkQuest server so that they will be able to participate in some of the special things that the sponsors have created for us. Once you have that account, please give the user ID to Mr. Hyatt so that he may alert Dr. Amela Sadajak, the Director of the ThinkQuest project. They have planned some live video conferences for us with leaders in the field. Certain portions of the ThinkQuest site are password protected, so you must not only have a My ThinkQuest account, but must also know the student access code and password. See Mr. Hyatt or Mr. Latimer for those access codes.


Sources for Project Ideas

Here are some possible places to get a few Project Ideas for Imagining the Future.

Introduction to OpenGl Graphics

OpenGL is a graphics package that is supported by a number of C and C++ programming languages. We will use Mesa Graphics which is a free version of OpenGL graphing things in both two and three dimensions. The following resources may be useful.

Computer Simulation and Potential Project Ideas

Our first experiment will be developing some computer simulations of simple physical or biological models. We will expand on these in the coming weeks, but for now we will use some simple OpenGL commands to create windows, plot points, and so forth. The following web pages may be of interest:

Displaying Your Work

There are a number of links here that will help you create a web page so you can display your work for this class and for ThinkQuest.