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Deadlines to apply for NCSA fellowships and internships are rapidly approaching


The National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) at the University of Illinois offers a number of undergraduate and graduate internship and HPC workforce-readiness programs. Undergraduate students, graduate students and faculty from institutions around the U.S. are invited to apply for these opportunities. Deadlines to apply for the opportunities highlighted below are quickly approaching. Apply today and gain access to world-class resources and mentorship at NCSA!

Blue Waters Graduate Fellowships

Blue Waters Graduate Fellowships provide PhD students with a year of support, including a $38,000 stipend, up to $12,000 in tuition allowance, an allocation of up to 50,000 node-hours on the powerful Blue Waters petascale computing system, and funds for travel to a Blue Waters Symposium to present research progress and results.

For the Fellowships, preference will be given to candidates engaged in multidisciplinary research projects that combine disciplines such as computer science, applied mathematics, and computational science applications. Applicants should be in the second or later year of their graduate program with a well-developed, related research proposal. Applicants must be a U.S. citizen or a permanent resident of the U.S. by the time of the application deadline, February 2, 2018.

Guidelines and forms for applying can be found here.

Blue Waters Student Internships

As part of the Blue Waters efforts to motivate and train the next generation of supercomputing researchers, the program is sponsoring about 20 undergraduate research interns each year. The goal is to engage undergraduate students in petascale computing research and development projects. The program provides each student a stipend totaling $5,000, a two-week intensive Petascale Institute, and an education allocation on the Blue Waters system. Select students will travel to the Blue Waters Symposium.

This program includes support for undergraduate internship activities at any accredited degree-granting institution in the United States. We strongly encourage the participation of students who belong to groups traditionally underrepresented in the sciences; including, but not limited to, women, minorities, and/or persons with disabilities. The internships awarded through this program may be for students working with a faculty mentor from their home institution, or at any other campus. Interested faculty can work with a particular student that they identify, or may select a qualified student with Blue Waters support through our program.Applications are due February 2, 2018.

Application guidelines and forms for applying can be found here.

Blue Waters Faculty Mentor Program

We are seeking faculty to engage undergraduate students in the above mentioned year-long internship opportunities. Students in the internship program will gain experiences involving the application of high-performance computing to problems in science, mathematics or engineering.

This program provides support for internship activities at any accredited degree-granting institution in the United States. Faculty who would like to mentor an undergraduate student should submit descriptions of available positions. Positions may be intended for a particular applicant or opened to all qualified applicants. Faculty are strongly encouraged to recruit students to apply for the positions they are submitting; students must submit an application for consideration. We strongly encourage participation by faculty and students who belong to groups traditionally underrepresented in the sciences; including, but not limited to, women, minorities, and/or persons with disabilities.

Faculty may submit positions by January 15, 2018. Submission guidelines and materials can be found here.

Students Pushing Innovation (SPIN) Undergraduate Program

NCSA has a history of nurturing innovative concepts, and some of the best ideas have come from highly motivated, creative undergraduates. The SPIN (Students Pushing Innovation) internship program was launched to provide University of Illinois undergraduates with the opportunity to apply their skills to real challenges in high-performance computing, data analysis and visualization, cybersecurity, and other areas of interest to NCSA.

Applications are due on January 31, 2018, and can be found here.

REU-INCLUSION Program

Incubating a New Community of Leaders Using Software, Inclusion, Innovation, Interdisciplinary and OpeN-Science (INCLUSION) is a 10-week summer Research Experience for Undergraduates (REU) program at NCSA. INCLUSION is an opportunity for 10 undergraduate students from underrepresented communities and Minority Serving Institutions to work in pairs with pairs of mentors on interdisciplinary socially-impactful INCLUSION research projects that develop and use open source software.

Applications for the REU-INCLUSION Program are due on February 10, 2018, and can be found here.

XSEDE EMPOWER Program

An XSEDE-wide effort is underway to expand the community by recruiting and enabling a diverse group of students who have the skills—or are interested in acquiring the skills—to participate in the actual work of the Extreme Science and Engineering Discovery Environment (XSEDE). The name of this effort is XSEDE EMPOWER (Expert Mentoring Producing Opportunities for Work, Education, and Research).

We invite the whole XSEDE community—staff, researchers, and educators—to recruit and mentor undergraduate students to engage in a variety of XSEDE activities, such as computational and/or data analytics research and education in all fields of study, networking, system maintenance and support, and visualization. The program provides a stipend to students and resources for the training of those students who work on XSEDE projects for one semester, one quarter, one summer, or longer.

Students must be enrolled as an undergraduate at a U.S. degree-granting institution through the duration of their participation. More information on requirements and various due dates can be found here.

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