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Applications due Feb. 3 for Blue Waters Graduate Fellowships


Applications are due Feb. 3 for the Blue Waters Graduate Fellowship program, which provides graduate students from across the country the opportunity to immerse themselves in a year of focused high-performance computing (HPC) research. Fellows will receive a stipend of $38,000, up to a $12,000 tuition allowance, and up to 50,000 node-hours on the petascale Blue Waters supercomputer to support their research.

The fellowship is designed to support PhD students who are engaged in a program of study and research that is directly relevant to the use of Blue Waters. Preference will be given to candidates engaged in a multidisciplinary research project that combines disciplines such as computer science, applied mathematics and computational science applications.

Researchers across the country are using Blue Waters to gain new understanding of how viruses attack our bodies, the formation of galaxies and of severe storms, space weather, sub-atomic physics, and other challenging topics. Blue Waters is designed to handle the most compute-intensive, memory-intensive, and data-intensive challenges in computational science and engineering. Blue Waters features:

  • Nearly 27,000 very high-performance computational nodes including more than 4,000 GPUs
  • More than 1.66 petabytes of memory
  • More than 25 usable petabytes of online disk storage
  • Up to 500 petabytes of nearline tape storage

For complete details of the Blue Waters system, visit bluewaters.ncsa.illinois.edu/hardware-summary.

Fellowship applicants must be a U.S. citizen or a permanent resident of the U.S. by the time of the application deadline. Applications will be evaluated based on:

  • Academic record from undergraduate and graduate work
  • Research plan and its relationship to use of the Blue Waters supercomputer
  • GRE scores
  • Related experience and service
  • Letters of reference

Applications, including all supporting materials except reference letters, must be submitted no later than midnight PST on Feb. 3. Reference letters are due by midnight PST on Feb. 10. Awards will be announced in spring 2016, with the tuition allowance applied to the 2016-2017 academic year.

For complete information on the fellowships, visit bluewaters.ncsa.illinois.edu/fellowships. Questions? Contact bwgf@ncsa.illinois.edu.

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