Author Archives: Stem Trek

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 …

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 …