Skilled scientists and engineers along with a public that understands science and technology are vital in today's technically competitive world. The United States must encourage its students to study and excel in scientific academic subjects and consider science and engineering as a possible career.

The national need for scientists and engineers and for a public that understands science and technology is more urgent today than ever before if the United States is to maintain its productivity and technical edge in the world market. Many capable high school students, however, lose interest in pursuing scientific academic subjects and in considering science or engineering as a possible career. An academic program that progresses from a state­ wide to a national competition is a way of developing science and computing knowledge among high school students and teachers, as well as instilling enthusiasm for science. This paper describes the New Mexico High School Supercomputing Challenge, a nonselective academic-year long program that was initiated in 1990. Teams of high school students from throughout New Mexico do a team computational science project using high-performance computers.

An 11-week training program aimed principally at graduate and postdoctoral students in computationally intensive fields is described. The program is designed to provide a balance between the specificity of computing center courses, the abstractness of computer science courses, and the personal contact of traditional apprentice approaches. It consists of seminars and clinics given by many visiting and local faculty and covers a variety of supercomputing concepts, issues, and practices related to architecture, operating systems, software design, numerical considerations, code optimization, graphics, communications, and networks. Its research component encourages understanding of scientific computing and supercomputer hardware issues. Flexibility in thinking about computing needs is emphasized by the use of several different supercomputer architectures.>

Los Alamos Scientific Laboratory (LASL) implemented a graphics system designed to support one user interface for all graphics devices in all operating environments at LASL. The Common Graphics System (CGS) will support Level One of the graphics standard proposed by the ACM/SIGGRAPH Graphic Standards Planning Committee. CGS is available in six operating environments of two different word lengths and supports four types of graphics devices. It can generate a pseudodevice file that may be postprocessed and edited for a particular graphics device, or it can generate device-specific graphics output directly. Program overlaying and dynamic buffer sharing are also supported. CGS is structured to isolate operating system dependencies and graphics device dependencies. It is written in the RATFOR (RATional FORtran) language, which supports control flow statements and macro expansion. CGS is maintained as a single-source program from which each version can be extracted automatically. 1 figure.