Applications now being accepted for Blue Waters Graduate Fellowships

The Blue Waters Graduate Fellowship Program is a new and unique program funded by the National Science Foundation. This prestigious program will select graduate students from across the country to immerse themselves in a year of focused high-performance computing (HPC) research. The fellowships will empower these talented graduate students to advance their HPC knowledge while also providing them with time and support to accelerate 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 the Blue Waters supercomputer. 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.

Fellowship recipients will receive a stipend of $38,000 for the one year of the fellowship. They will also receive up to a $12,000 tuition allowance. During the fellowship year, the fellow’s academic institution is asked to exempt the recipient of any other tuition and fee charges normally charged to students of comparable academic standing. Recipients will receive travel funds to attend a Blue Waters symposium and may also receive funding to present a paper at another scientific meeting. The fellowship provides up to 100,000 node-hours on the Blue Waters system to support the fellow’s research.

Blue Waters is a truly extraordinary supercomputer, 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 near-line tape storage.

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

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.

For the fellowships, 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. 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
• Research plan and its relationship to use of the Blue Waters supercomputer
• GRE score
• Related experience and service
• Letters of reference

Applications, including all supporting materials, must be submitted no later than 9 pm EST on Feb. 3, 2014. Awards will be made in spring 2014, with the tuition allowance applied to the 2014-2015 academic year.

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

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