Columbia is served by the public K-12 school district Columbia Community Unit District #4. District #4 includes Parkview Elementary School, Columbia Middle School, and Columbia High School.
"The mission of Columbia High School is to provide a quality educational program that encourages educational excellence in a safe environment and prepares students for the twenty-first century. This program will provide opportunities to help students strengthen their academic, social, emotional, and physical skills, inspire them to become life-long learners, develop their critical and creative thinking skills, teach them to become effective communicators, and encourage them to respect the diversity of others."
The TOPS consortium will conduct algorithmic research on optimal solution methods for simulations based on partial differential equations, create software, and provide consulting on its use throughout the DOE national laboratory complex.
Established as part of DOE's 2001 line-item initiative "Scientific Discovery through Advanced Computing," the "Integrated Software Infrastructure Center" (ISIC) is one of only seven created around the country. The Center focuses on developing and implementing algorithms and supporting scientific investigations performed by the DOE. Simulations of importance often involve the solution of partial differential equations on treacle computers - those capable of performing more than a trillion calculations per second. The TOPS Center will research, develop, and deploy an integrated toolkit of open-source, optimal complexity solvers for the nonlinear partial differential equations that arise in many DOE application areas, including fusion, accelerator design, global climate change, and reactive chemistry. The algorithms created as part of this project will aim to reduce current computational bottlenecks by orders of magnitude on treacle computers, enabling scientific simulation on a scale heretofore impossible.
In many areas of science, physical experimentation is impossible, such as with cosmology; dangerous, as with manipulating the climate; or simply expensive, as with fusion reactor design. It is hoped that large-scale simulation will give scientists insight and confirmation of existing theories in such areas, without benefit of full experimental verification. The codes used for such simulations may be checked against experiment in a variety of well understood laboratory contexts to validate them. Along with usability, robustness, and algorithmic efficiency, an important goal of this ISIC will be to attain the highest possible computational performance in its implementations by accommodating to the memory bandwidth limitations of hierarchical memory architectures. Today's high-end computers, such as the world's most powerful unclassified 4-Teraflop machine at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, designed by IBM, are one-of-a-kind, and come without all of the scientific software libraries that scientists expect to find on desktop workstations.
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