The Computational Science for Undergraduate Research Experience (CSURE) REU Site project will allow a group of undergraduate students to explore and apply computational science models and techniques to an array of data- and computation-intensive scientific questions, using the supercomputers at the National Institute for Computational Sciences (NICS). This project will prepare the participating students for the demanding task of running scientific codes on a scale beyond thousands of processing units. To ensure cutting-edge science, CSURE will partner with teams of scientists at the UT/ORNL Joint Institute for Computational Sciences, who are working at the forefront of computational research in the areas of mathematics, chemistry, biology, physics, and engineering. To broaden participation, CSURE will partner with smaller regional colleges and with Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs), to recruit students who would benefit from access to computational resources beyond the capacities of their home campuses.
The CSURE program focuses on five different scientific domains: chemistry and material sciences, systems biology, engineering mechanics, atmospheric sciences, and parallel solvers on emergent platforms. The program for each summer will start with a two-week intensive introduction to the supercomputing environment and to the core computational methods and tools in that summer's focus area. Each student will then be assigned a project appropriate for his or her background and skill level, and will be encouraged to work on the project's salient computational modeling problems, under the supervision of a team of mentors and advisors. Activities will include individual and collaborative computational analysis, meetings and discussions with project personnel, group presentations and feedback sessions, attendance at research seminars, and a final report and public presentation.
CSURE will provide scientific adventure and discovery to undergraduates from a range of science domains, unified by a coherent intellectual focus on scientific computing. Integrating the expertise of faculty researchers and scientific computing specialists, this program will enable each undergraduate to conduct meaningful original research, through the use of supercomputing tools to investigate current significant research problems. The key mission of this program is to convey the importance of computational science and supercomputer infrasatructure for scientific discovery and innovation.
