Author Archives: Stem Trek

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 …

Bonjour, STEM-Trek!

I’ve learned a bit of French and am enjoying my stay at CERN.

This week, I took a tour of the Synchrocyclotron, CERN’s first accelerator, and visited the ATLAS experiment control room. Both are breathtaking ‘sciency’ places. I also participated in the CERN summer students soccer match against CERN teams that play in a local league.

Our Neutrino cluster is taking shape. We performed a massive OS installation on Dell PowerEdge 1950 machines. I ran into a few challenges–including hardware issues, a CMOS problem and I had to change the default settings of the two Network Interface Cards that came with the machines (troubleshooting …

Dear Elizabeth and Nages (Sieslack, ISC),

I am back to work full of energy!

I must catch up with few important things this week, but first wanted to let you know that I met with my team members today and shared highlights from the conference. They have encouraged me to conduct a workshop to address how we might incorporate some of the tools, methods and applications I learned about while I was at ISC in Frankfurt.

It may also interest you to know that while I was at ISC, I was invited to participate in an interview with Science Node where I discussed the importance of HPC and use-cases …

Watch for news about the conference from STEM-Trek guest blogger Bobby Hollingsworth.

Bobby’s research is in biochemistry, where he focuses on bioinformatics and computational protein structure-functional relationships. He often uses high performance computing for molecular dynamics simulations, and takes an interest in efficient resource use for his lab group’s simulations.

Bobby graduated from Virginia Tech in the spring with degrees in chemical engineering, biochemistry, and chemistry. He will pursue a Ph.D. in the biomedical sciences at Harvard University this fall.

Thanks for blogging for us, Bobby. We look forward to your posts!

Follow @PEARC_17 on Twitter; Use the conference hashtag in posts: #PEARC17; Share photos on Facebook; Search for @PEARChpc to find the official page.

Thank you Google, Micron Foundation, Science Gateways Community Institute, SDSC and XSEDE for supporting the PEARC17 …

Thanks, CERN & Cray!

Badisa Mosesane, an undergraduate scholar who studies computer science at the University of Botswana in Gaborone, recently joined other students from developing nations around the world in Geneva, Switzerland to participate in the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) Summer Student Program.

Each year, advanced undergraduate and beginning graduate students from developing countries who study physics, computing and engineering are encouraged to apply—and it’s very competitive! In 2016, 137 students from 60 countries were represented and more than 1,000 have participated since the program began in 2003.

For eight weeks this summer, Badisa will attend lectures, and work side-by-side with student-peers and scientists from a range of disciplines on some of the world’s biggest experiments. The students will have the opportunity to foster a multinational, interdisciplinary professional network that will prove useful throughout their careers. Badisa is assigned to the Experimental Physics Neutrino group …

The Practice & Experience in Advanced Research Computing Conference Student Program is pleased to announce that 66 students will attend PEARC17 in New Orleans, July 9-13, 2017.

“Since this is PEARC’s maiden voyage, we’re especially pleased at the number and diversity of students who qualified to participate,” said Student Program Chair Alana Romanella (Virginia Tech). “It was our goal to attract candidates from a variety of research domains and demographics that are traditionally under-represented in computational and data science degree programs and careers. Adding diversity to the national advanced research computing workforce pipeline is also a priority for organizations that supported PEARC student travel, including STEM-Trek, XSEDE, Google, Micron Foundation, Science Gateway Community Institute, Echo Valley Meats, and the San Diego Supercomputer Center,” she added.

Among 46 students who will receive travel support to attend PEARC17, 32 percent are female, and 50 percent …

We are pleased to announce that a STEM-Trek donation from Micron Foundation will make it possible for more scholars to participate in the PEARC17 conference and student program. The Practice & Experience in Advanced Research Computing conference will be held in New Orleans, Louisiana, July 9-13, 2017.

PEARC student-participants will have access to the general conference technical program, plus activities that are being developed specifically for them by experienced education and outreach specialists from national laboratories and research institutions. The student program begins with a cybersecurity presentation by New Orleans-based Federal Bureau of Investigation agents, and includes an intensive collaborative modeling and analysis challenge; a session on careers in modeling and large data analytics; a mentoring program; and a volunteer effort where they’ll learn how conferences are facilitated, from the inside-out!

“We’re delighted to support STEM-Trek and the PEARC17 Student Program,” said Dee Mooney, Micron Foundation Executive Director. “It’s a great …