22 students selected for Blue Waters Student Internship Program

Shodor and the Blue Waters project have selected 19 undergraduate students and three graduate students from across the country to participate in the Blue Waters Student Internship Program for 2015-2016. Interns will learn to apply high-performance computing to problems in science, mathematics, and engineering through the year-long program. Their experience will begin later this month with a two-week Petascale Institute at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA).

Up to 1 percent of the computing capacity of Blue Waters is available for education and workforce development efforts aimed at preparing the next generation of students and teachers to tackle challenges with advanced computing power.

The 2015-2016 Blue Waters Interns

• Olivia Alford, Centre College
  Mentor: David Toth, Centre College
  Project: Drug Discovery Performance Comparison
• Andrew Biedermann, University of Virginia
  Mentor: Michael Shirts, University of Virginia
  Project: Modeling the Molecular Properties of Polymer Membranes for Water Purification
• Max Collins, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
  Mentor: Alan Craig, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
  Project: Augmented Reality Visualization of Blue Waters Data
• Daniel Couch, Wofford College
  Mentor: Angela Shiflet, Wofford College
  Project: Implementing HPC Bioinformatics Algorithms
• Francisco Gonzalez, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
  Mentor: Arif Masud, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
  Project: Addressing FSI Issues in Blood-Artery Interaction Models
• Felipe Gutierrez, University of Wisconsin at Madison
  Mentor: Dan Negrut, University of Wisconsin-Madison
  Project: Modeling and Simulation of Large-scale Fluid-Solid Interaction Problems
• Joseph Haddad, The University of Akron
  Mentor: Tim O’Neil, The University of Akron
  Project: Parallel Implementation of Bayesian Network Structure Learning Algorithms
• Dinushka Herath, Clark Atlanta University
  Mentor: Dinadayalane Tandabany, Clark Atlanta University
  Project: Undergraduate Internship for Computational Nano-engineering Research
• Harshil Kamdar, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
  Mentor: Robert Brunner, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
  Project: Machine Learning Applied to Cosmological Simulations
• Platon Karpov,State University of New York at Stony Brook
  Mentor: Alan Calder, Stony Brook University
  Project: Toward Simulating Black Widow Binaries with CASTRO
• Qingyuan Liu, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
  Mentor: Diwakar Shukla, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
  Project: Simulations of Gas Diffusion in Hydrogenases
• Richard Long, Washington State University
  Mentor: Ananth Kalyanaraman, Washington State University
  Project: Topological Analysis for Plant Phenomics Data
• Venkata Suhas Maringanti, Trinity College in Connecticut
  Mentor: Peter Yoon, Trinity College in Connecticut
  Project: VLSI Routing and Estimation
• Linh Van Nguyen, Hampden-Sydney College
  Mentor: Paul Hemler, Hampden-Sydney College
  Project: HPC Database Implementation Intern
• Eric Peterson, Waubonsee Community College
  Mentor: Victor Pinks, Marmion Academy
  Project: How to Build a Fast HPC n-Body Engine from Scratch
• Kiara Wootson, Bethune-Cookman University
  Mentor: Raphael Isokpehi, Bethune-Cookman University
  Project: Predicting Microbial Genome-Encoded Biomolecular Networks
• Tara Urner, Earlham College
  Mentor: Charlie Peck, Earlham College
  Project: BioInformatics with Mothur
• Shariemar Lopez Vazquez, Universidad de Puerto Rico en Mayaguez
  Mentor: Ana Gonzalez, Universidad de Puerto Rico en Mayaguez
  Project: Parallelizing Suffix Array Construction
• Wesley Yu, University of Texas at Austin
  Mentor: Hans Mark, University of Texas at Austin
  Project: Non-Impulsive Trajectory Modeling for Interplanetary Cargo Missions

Several graduate students are also participating in the internship program. They are:

• Ran Sun, Louisiana Tech University
  Mentor: Tom Bishop, Louisiana Tech University
  Project: Genomics in 3D: Overnight Comparative Studies of Mono-Nucleosomes
• Anik Karan, Louisiana Tech University
  Mentor: Tom Bishop, Louisiana Tech University
  Project: Genomics in 3D: Overnight Comparative Studies of Mono-Nucleosomes
• Yuezhi Li, Illinois State University
  Mentor and project TBD

In addition to the Blue Waters interns, students in the XSEDE Scholars program will also participate in the two-week petascale workshop, as will University of Illinois students Moeen Meigooni and Erik Saathoff.

Blue Waters, supported by the National Science Foundation and the University of Illinois, is one of the world’s most powerful supercomputers and the fastest on a university campus. In collaboration with Blue Waters, Shodor and the National Computational Science Institute provide support and content for the internship program and Petascale Institute. Shodor, a national resource for computational science education, is located in Durham, North Carolina, and serves students and educators nationwide.

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