BYU

Office of Research Computing

Scientific Computing Course

dna_scientific_compu Title: Scientific Computing
Catalog number: IT&C 530, section 1 (online)
Semesters: Fall and Winter; Winter offerings after 2026 are under review, Fall will continue to be offered
Credit Hours: 3

Course content link

About the Course

The Scientific Computing course has been taught since Winter 2016, originally as a special topics class (IT&C 515R). The course is for graduate and advanced undergraduate students. Students come from a wide variety of programs such as Biology, Chemistry, Economics, Mechanical Engineering, and Physics; typically, about half are graduate students and about half are undergraduates.

This course is intended for students whose current or future coursework or research involves computational science (e.g. computational fluid dynamics, genomics, finite element analysis, economics simulations, computational linguistics, physics, etc).

The class will help students learn the principles of operating in a typical scientific computing environment. Topics include typical Linux shells and commands, hardware (CPU, GPU, memory, network, etc), storage management, job scheduling, code and workflow optimization, code management, results verification, and programming. A semester-long project will help students apply the principles that are taught in class.

BYU Online

Beginning Winter 2021, the course is available exclusively through BYU Online (see this FAQ page for details about BYU Online). BYU Online is semester-based and included in your tuition, unlike Independent Study.

Prerequisites

Please see our course syllabus for more details.

Elective Credit

Many students have been able to use this class to fulfill an elective by petitioning their program. Typically, this means emailing or meeting with your advisor. It's up to you to arrange this.