Undergraduate Research Opportunities on Blue Waters Petascale Computer

The Blue Waters Undergraduate Petascale Education Program is offering 17 undergraduate research internships for 2010-2011. Students will be paired with members of an existing research or educational team that is conducting petascale computing research. The program will provide students with computational thinking skills and the knowledge they need to advance scientific computing throughout their careers.

The NCSA Blue Waters project, in collaboration with the National Computational Science Institute (NCSI) and national HPC programs, is launching a coordinated effort to prepare current and future generations of students with the computational thinking skills, knowledge and commitment to advance scientific computing through the use of high performance computing (HPC) resources and environments.

Petascale computing is more complex than previous computing paradigms. New approaches for teaching and learning are required, and no single educational institution has the expertise and experience needed to fully exploit this extraordinary capability.

Preparation for petascale computing requires solid grounding in Computational Science and Engineering (CSE), HPC and HPC-related curricula. As a community, we must address the engagement of a larger and more diverse workforce to broaden participation and to ensure that CSE education keeps pace with the evolution of science and technology. We will leverage faculty expertise to establish best practices, identify and fill gaps, and modernize the CSE curriculum across all science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) fields.

The NCSA Blue Waters petascale computing facility funded by NSF will support this effort by providing 1% of the computing capacity of its computational infrastructure in direct support of educational applications. The Blue Waters system will support sustained petaflop performance of scientific codes, and thereby provide a unique educational learning experience for students across the nation.

Learn more at: http://www.ncsa.illinois.edu/News/10/0304Undergraduate.html