SDSC Hosts NSF-Sponsored Graduate Program Focused on Supercomputing Skills

Published 06/03/2008

For Immediate Release

Media Contacts:
Jan Zverina, SDSC Communications, 858 534-5111 or jzverina@sdsc.edu
Warren R. Froelich, SDSC Communications, 858 822-3622 or froelich@sdsc.edu

The San Diego Supercomputer Center (SDSC) announced today its 2008 internship and mentoring program specifically designed to train graduate students to incorporate the latest high performance computing (HPC) tools and techniques into their ongoing research.

The 'Cyberinfrastructure Experiences for Graduate Students' (CIEG) program, funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF), was developed as a graduate student extension of SDSC's Strategic Applications Collaborations (SAC) initiative. Based on a successful NSF-funded pilot program at SDSC in 2007, this year's program is focused on training graduate students to use the latest HPC resources within the national TeraGrid, the world's largest open scientific discovery infrastructure linking compute resources at 11 partner sites across the U.S.

"Hands-on internship experiences have proven effective for learners at many levels, particularly when the experience connects with the learners' own interests" said Diane Baxter, Education Director at SDSC. "Continued mentoring through the academic year by SDSC scientific support staff will allow these students to extend their experience to colleagues and advisors, providing a cost-effective approach to address a significant national educational challenge: expanding the cadre of researchers who are able to take full advantage of our most powerful computational tools."

Beginning June 23, fourteen engineering graduate students from across the nation, recruited through the NSF Engineering Directorate, will participate in CIEG. The program launches with a week-long intensive training workshop, after which students will spend another 10 weeks at UCSD working closely with SDSC SAC scientists to use HPC resources in support of their own research projects.

As an organized research unit of UC San Diego, SDSC is a national leader in creating and providing cyberinfrastructure for data-intensive research. Cyberinfrastructure refers to an accessible and integrated network of computer-based resources and expertise, focused on accelerating scientific inquiry and discovery. SDSC is a founding member of the national TeraGrid, which has a combined compute capability approaching one petaflop (10^15 calculations per second), or equal to the computing power of about 200,000 typical laptops.

Related Links

San Diego Supercomputer Center (SDSC): www.sdsc.edu
Strategic Applications Collaboration (SAC) program: www.sdsc.edu/us/sac
TeraGrid: www.teragrid.org
National Science Foundation: www.nsf.gov