Distributed Computing Education, Part 4: Training Infrastructure

In the first article of this series, we identified the need for teaching environments that provide infrastructure to support education and training in distributed computing. Training infrastructure, or t-infrastructure, is analogous to the teaching laboratory in biology and is a vital tool for educators and students. In practice, t- infrastructure includes the computing equipment, digital communications, software, data, and support staff necessary to teach a course. The International Summer Schools in Grid Computing (ISSGC) series and the first International Winter School on Grid Computing (IWSGC 08) used the Grid INFN Laboratory of Dissemination Activities (GILDA) infrastructure so students could gain hands-on experience with middleware. Here, we describe GILDA, related summer and winter school experiences, multimiddleware integration, t-infrastructure, and academic courses, concluding with an analysis and recommendations.