Rate My Professor Charlie Peck

Peck's academic interests encompass parallel and distributed computing, computational science, bioinformatics, visualization of scientific data, expeditionary science, hardware and software systems, technology for disaster preparation and response, and sustainable energy production and conservation. Since 2012, he has led Earlham College's Icelandic Field Studies program, designing and deploying geocoded sensor platforms for environmental monitoring with field testing in Iceland, studying glacier dynamics at Sólheimajökull glacier with nine students and three faculty in 2017, examining environmental microbial communities through soil and water sampling and DNA analysis, and supporting archaeological excavations including sampling at Skalanes and digs at Seydisfjordur and Stod for Norse settlement artifacts. As co-PI, he spearheaded the LittleFe project, an inexpensive educational appliance for parallel and distributed computing; the Bootable Cluster CD project; and Earlham's Cluster Computing Group. Key publications include "Teaching parallel computing to science faculty: best practices and common pitfalls" (ACM Principles and Practices of Parallel Programming conference, 2006, with D. Joiner, P. Gray, and T. Murphy); "BigFe - A cost and power efficient platform for high performance computing education" (TeraGrid 2006 poster, with A. Lemann, K. Hunter, and J. McCoy); and SIAM posters such as "LittleFe - The low-cost portable cluster for computational science education" (2006) and "Benchmarking and Tuning the GROMACS Molecular Dynamics Package on Beowulf Clusters" (2004). Peck advises the WebDev student group, is profiled as a National Geographic Explorer, and maintains memberships in ACM SIGCSE, IEEE Computer Society, the Supercomputing Conference Education Program, and XSEDE.