Author Archives: Stem Trek

UPDATE: Tirelo was able to join us in Denver; mostly self-funded. We were able to defray some of her expenses due to the generosity of STEM-Trek donors and friends. Thank you!

Tirelo was among 35 from a dozen countries who applied for travel grants that would allow them to attend the “Understanding Risk in Shared CyberEcosystems” cybersecurity workshop that will be held Nov. 11-16 in Denver, Colorado during the annual supercomputing conference, or SC17.

While her application reviewed extremely well, factors beyond Tirelo’s control worked against her. First of all, she’s a student, and this particular STEM-Trek call for participation required applicants to work at least 50 percent in a professional role supporting students, faculty and staff who use High Performance Computing (HPC).

And, that she does. But she’s a student nonetheless.

Another female student from her school also applied, and ranked slightly higher. She made the cut, …

Dear STEM-Trek,

It has been an exciting journey at CERN, and time flies! This is my eighth and final week, and I will fly home on Sunday.  Every moment has been enjoyable: academically, professionally and socially. I am super excited to have learned so much in such a short amount of time! I worked with an exceptionally skilled and diverse support team, and am now motivated to master more HPC applications since I’ve seen how they’re used across disciplines.

Our Neutrino cluster is progressing well. We managed to solve most of the problems we were experiencing the last time I wrote. As I mentioned, the system was configured with Puppet and its suite of …

Dear STEM-Trek,

Wow, David Ojika‘s story is inspiring! I wish I could meet him one day and would love to read his paper “Accelerating High-energy Physics Exploration with Deep Learning.

In many of the workshops I’ve recently attended, central themes have included Deep Learning & ML for data acquisition and reconstruction. These skills will be needed in the exascale era, which is just around the corner.

In fact, I was just reading about a collaboration between CERN and the Square Kilometer Array (SKA) to address burning issues associated with data acquisition, storage, management and analysis for the massive amount of data these two projects will generate. Like Ojika, I think we’d …

By David Paz (Massachusetts Institute of Technology; University of California at San Diego; San Diego Supercomputer Center)

My alarm went off at 1:30 a.m. It was time for a slight “context switch” as I traveled to Boston’s Logan Airport on my way to New Orleans to attend my first-ever research conference: PEARC17.

I joined the conference student program one day late since I had an MIT-related commitment I couldn’t reschedule. While I feared I would miss important activities–and it was disappointing to miss the orientation, FBI agent cybersecurity presentation and opportunity to meet fellow students in one venue–the circumstances of my late arrival led to one of the more interesting highlights of my PEARC17 experience. 

When I arrived at the hotel, I had some time before the next scheduled activity, and wanted to get some work accomplished in my room. When I opened the door to my assigned room, …

By Guest Blogger Bobby Hollingsworth (V-Tech/Harvard), with assistance from Erica Corder (V-Tech)

David Ojika plans to use his expertise in high performance computing (HPC) to collaborate with scientists across disciplines and the world. Ojika, a fourth-year computer engineering Ph.D. candidate at the University of Florida, received his first master’s degree in electrical engineering from California State University Los Angeles and a second in computer engineering from the University of Florida. He is also an XSEDE Student Campus Champion.

Ojika was among 66 students from dozens of U.S. colleges and universities who attended the Practice & Experience in Advanced Research Computing (PEARC17) conference last week. His PEARC17 participation was supported by Google, Micron Foundation and the Science Gateways Community Institute (SGCI) via their donations to STEM-Trek Nonprofit.

An internship with Intel stimulated Ojika’s interests in high performance computing (HPC) and deep-learning. As a Xeon Phi fellow, Ojika had the opportunity …

By Guest Blogger Bobby Hollingsworth (V-Tech/Harvard), with assistance from Erica Corder (V-Tech)

Sneha Tilak (Indiana University at Bloomington) sees a silver lining in cloud computing. Now a second-year master’s student studying computer science at IU, she is reaching for the sky with a career in distributed computing.

Tilak was among 66 students from dozens of U.S. colleges and universities who attended the Practice & Experience in Advanced Research Computing (PEARC17) conference last week. Her PEARC17 participation was supported by Google, Micron Foundation and the Science Gateways Community Institute (SGCI) via their donations to STEM-Trek Nonprofit.

Tilak has been interested in computer science (CS) since the 9th grade when she took an elective CS course in high school. Later at the Visvesvaraya Technological University in Belgaum, India, Tilak held multiple internship positions and worked on projects that exposed her to different frontiers and opportunities in computing. After graduation, she worked as …

By STEM-Trek Guest Blogger Bobby Hollingsworth (V-Tech/Harvard)

Day Three of PEARC17 in New Orleans, Louisiana

Remember that I said day two was busy? Well, the third day was no different. PEARC17 has been an eventful and information-packed experience!

In the morning, I had breakfast with Dr. Bob Freeman who manages one of Harvard’s computing clusters. He offered pointers, including tips on how to pick an advisor, setting a good work-life balance and the logistics of resource access at Harvard. Afterwards, I heard the day’s plenary speaker, Dr. Paul Morin from the University of Minnesota. His talk titled “Mapping the Poles with Petascale” highlighted interesting geospatial mapping of the artic. The images Dr. Morin presented were spectacular—it’s truly amazing how high performance computing (HPC) is enabling high resolution and dynamic data in the geospatial field. In fact, PEARC17 has illuminated the degree of complexity possible with HPC, and the breadth …

by Guest Blogger Bobby Hollingsworth (V-Tech/Harvard), with assistance from Erica Corder (V-Tech)

Laura Nichols was among 66 students from dozens of U.S. colleges and universities who attended the Practice & Experience in Advanced Research Computing (PEARC17) conference this week. Her travel to New Orleans was supported by her university and STEM-Trek donations from Google, Micron Foundation and the Science Gateways Community Institute.

One day, Nichols hopes to make her work in high performance computing (HPC) openly-accessible to scientists around the globe. Armed with a bachelor’s degree in physics from Clarksville, Tennessee-based Austin Peay State University, Nichols will enroll in a physics master’s program at the University of Memphis this fall.

Nichols credits her involvement with HPC to Austin Peay XSEDE Campus Champion Justin Oelgoetz, her research, and a course that gave her access to Blue Waters, one of the most powerful supercomputers in the world. The course taught Nichols …

By Bobby Hollingsworth (V-Tech/Harvard), Guest Blogger

Today was likely the busiest day of the PEARC17 conference as it involved speakers, modeling and the poster presentation. At breakfast I met up with one of my professors, Dr. Anne Brown, to catch up from Day 1 of the conference.

We then made our way to the plenary speech by Dr. Paula Stephan. Her lecture focused on the economics of academic science and incentive-based research. I find the interplay between incentives and novelty fascinating—often career-success based initiatives led to higher quality publications, whereas monetary awards for publications led to lower publication success rates. Additionally, Dr. Stephan analyzed the costs versus productivity of various positions in academia; the US national average pay for post-doctoral fellows seems awfully low!

Modeling day stemmed several hours of collaborative project-based work. We were presented with various projects and chose to model Malaria spread through a …

By Bobby Hollingsworth (V-Tech/Harvard), Guest Blogger

I left Virginia Tech on the morning of July 9 eager to take part in the PEARC17 Student Program. As someone who works in experimental and applied computational biology, I was a bit anxious to throw myself into an environment of computational researchers and high-performance computing specialists. My research generally brings me in contact with chemists and biologists — meaning PEARC17 is definitely an experience out of my comfort zone.

On the SuperShuttle ride to the hotel from the New Orleans airport, I talked to Ayesha, a student from Albany State University. Her research in computational biology is exciting and meeting her put to ease my irrational fears of being the only …