This research experience for undergraduates (REU) project aims to engage undergraduates in learning experiences that increase student's interest and ability to conduct computational and data science research in a range of scientific domains. The ability to effectively solve problems on high-performance computational resources is an area of increasing national importance. The educational process supported by iCER ACRES will enable students to address a range of computational projects of significant benefit to the US. In particular, computational science is now important in improving the health of the country, advancing our common prosperity and welfare and advancing the cyber-defense of the US. Projects provided through this site will advance the overall national skillset in the computational and data sciences field through hands-on educational activities. In addition to providing undergraduates with research learning experiences, this project will broaden the participation of underrepresented populations in STEM research, provide early HPC exposure to students from institutions with limited access to HPC resources, especially women and underrepresented groups and motivate students to pursue careers in computational fields.

The overarching goal of the program is to increase students' technical skillset to address in a broad range of computational fields. iCER ACRES achieves this goal by: (i) engaging undergraduates in original interdisciplinary collaborative research in data science and scientific computing domains; (ii) introducing students to a broad set of "classical" programming algorithms and their applications for problem-solving in data science and scientific computing; and (iii) exposing undergraduates to high performance computing (HPC) resources used to conduct research and software engineering practices applied to increase the quality of scientific applications. These program elements are designed to: - Allow students to experience and learn about the research process through working on an unsolved, open-ended research problem; - Increase participants' disciplinary knowledge and their understanding of how that knowledge may be applied; - Assist students in defining and refining their research and career interests; - Provide students with an introduction to the world of academia and graduate school; and - Provide a forum for collegial interaction with a faculty member. Research projects provided through this site focus on the development and enhancement of algorithms, models, and software for applications in multiple domains that require high performance resources. These domains include but are not limited to: computational chemistry, biology, astrophysics, mathematics, big data science, computational electromagnetics and cybersecurity. This site is supported by the Department of Defense in partnership with the NSF REU program.

Agency
National Science Foundation (NSF)
Institute
Division of Advanced CyberInfrastructure (ACI)
Type
Standard Grant (Standard)
Application #
1560168
Program Officer
Alan Sussman
Project Start
Project End
Budget Start
2016-08-01
Budget End
2019-07-31
Support Year
Fiscal Year
2015
Total Cost
$360,000
Indirect Cost
Name
Michigan State University
Department
Type
DUNS #
City
East Lansing
State
MI
Country
United States
Zip Code
48824