Los Alamos Reporter

New Mexico Consortium Continues To Provide Summer Student Programs And Internships To USRC Students

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NEW MEXICO CONSORTIUM NEWS

Despite the current Covid-19 pandemic, the New Mexico Consortium (NMC) is continuing to provide summer student programs and internships to Ultrascale Systems Research Center (USRC) students. The only difference this year is instead of traveling to Los Alamos and living in this high mountain town, the high performance computing student interns will instead perform research under a USRC mentor from where they currently live.

The USRC is a collaboration between the NMC and Los Alamos National Laboratory to engage universities and industry nationally in support of high performance computing research. USRC researchers investigate the challenges of computing at extreme scales with a focus on balance and efficiency. The research at the USRC focuses on high performance computing issues such as storage, networking, resilience, system software, and machine learning.  To read more about what types of research the USRC focuses on see: https://usrc.lanl.gov/focus-areas.php

In a typical summer, students arrive in May and June and usually work for the NCM/USRC through August, although some end up working year-round in Los Alamos. USRC researchers provide students and interns with computer science research experience, mentorship, as well as work experience. Students and interns are hired through the NMC, which provides comprehensive support, guidance and resources to help the researchers and students advance their work including connections to top scientists and facilities at Los Alamos National Laboratory.

This year will be no different except that students will work for the USRC from wherever they currently reside and will receive mentorship virtually. The USRC plans on having 20 interns working this summer. These interns include undergraduate students, post-baccalaureate students, graduate students, and post-doctoral students.

Summer students and interns do research on a wide range of high performance computing topics. For example, the research topics covered during the summer of 2019 included:

  • Deep I/O: Smart Networks for Fast Storage
  • Improving SaNSA: Spark Integration and Anomaly Detection in HPC State Analysis
  • Shortening Hamming Codes to Better Correct 2-bit Errors
  • Differential Privacy for Supercomputer Sensor Data
  • Profiling HPC Application Resilience using DisCVar
  • Examining Contextual Based Error Correction Techniques in CLAMR
  • Performance Characterization of DRAM-NVM Hybrid Memory Architecture for HPC Applications using Intel Optane DC Persistent Memory Modules
  • Algorithm Learning with the Diagonal Neural GPU
  • Revere: HPC Job Failure Early Alert
  • FI-VIS: Towards Understanding Fault Propagation through Visualization
  • In-Situ Partitioning for Range Queries
  • Tiered Stripeset: Data Availability During Failure Bursts
  • Providing order to the world: Range query for KV-SSD
  • Petavision: Interpolating Video and Up-Sampling Simulations
  • Analyzing Excessive Memory Faults on Trinity and Trinitite
  • KrakenBoot: Firmware-Level Cluster Provisioning via UEFI Surgery

At the close of the summer, the USRC typically hosts a Summer Research Symposium showcasing the work of summer interns, full-time staff, and PIs. The USRC Summer Symposium is a chance to show off their hard work through giving a presentation. The symposium is also for students to network with the LANL high performance computing PIs and staff. The 2020 USRC Student Symposium will either be canceled or will be held virtually this year. USRC leaders will decide in the next couple months. Information and photos from past USRC Student Symposiums can be found at https://usrc.lanl.gov/student-symposiums.php

The result of this long-standing tradition of bringing in summer students and interns through the NMC has been a tried and true method of finding talented computer science expertise, which has led to many permanent hires at the USRC. The USRC is always looking for individuals who would like to collaborate on challenging high performance computing research. Interested students looking for a dissertation topic, faculty sabbaticals, postdocs and industry researchers should apply by contacting the USRC at: usrc-contact@lanl.gov

To learn more about the Ultrascale Systems Research Center see: https://usrc.lanl.gov/