This award provides support for students to attend the OSG User School and the XSEDE-13 conference in San Diego. The participants will learn about the advances and increased sophistication of research that are being enabled by XSEDE and OSG. The broader impacts will be through the direct engagement of students who may, in the future, become researchers, including underrepresented students, including those at Minority Serving Institutions (MSIs) and smaller colleges and universities across the country
XSEDE13 showcased the discoveries, innovations, and achievements of those who use XSEDE large-scale computing resources and those who help to build and support them. XSEDE13 also created a forum for discussion of current needs and future plans among researchers, students, XSEDE staff, and NSF representatives. XSEDE13 was held July 21-25, 2013 in San Diego. The conference team worked to recruit, educate, and motivate students to pursue computational science education and research across a diverse array of STEM fields. 145 high school, undergraduate, and graduate students (including 22 attendees of the 2013 OSG User School) participated in the XSEDE13 Student Program by either presenting at the conference or volunteering to assist with the conference. Higher education students were recruited from 2- and 4-year institutions, minority serving institutions, EPSCoR institutions, and PhD granting universities across the US. Participants in the Student Program interacted directly with leading scientists and technology experts in the extreme science and computing field through participation in tutorials, presentations, the Student Poster Session and two mentoring events, the Welcome dinner event and a subsequent luncheon in which students could share their conference experience with their assigned mentor and their peers. Other activities included a programming competition (which included a winning high school team) and two offsite activities, organized by the Student Program, but funded by the students themselves. The opening student dinner included students, mentors and Campus Champions from the students’ home institutions. Mentors and Campus Champions assisted the students in choosing tutorials and conference sessions which best fit the students’ needs and interests. Tutorials and workshops were featured on the first day of the conference. These tutorials, focused on supercomputing, data mining and visualization, were oriented towards the beginning computational scientist and were appropriate for students new to the field of high performance computing. Graduate students already familiar with high performance computing were encouraged to attend the more advanced workshops offered through the XSEDE13 conference. Student Program participants were asked to submit posters and papers (undergraduate and graduate students), which demonstrate new and relevant research involving high performance computing. Posters were presented during an evening social event that allowed all conference attendees the opportunity to engage the students about their work. Awards recognized the top three posters in each student category and authors of the top 3 student papers were acknowledged as XSEDE Emerging Scientists. The 2013 OSG User School attendees were encouraged to submit to the Student Poster Contest particularly posters that summarize projects or experiences from the OSG User School. By the end of the XSEDE13 conference, students who participate in the Student Program were able to describe the basic resources and services provided by XSEDE, understand the process for requesting access to XSEDE resources through their Campus Champion or through the XSEDE User Portal, and appreciate the benefits of XSEDE for enhancing science and engineering in all fields. These students now have a broader network of fellow students and leaders in computational science including a personal mentor who can advise them on their own education and career goals. Students were given a certificate of participation, as well as nicely framed awards for students who win the best paper and the best poster awards at the conference. The 2013 Open Science Grid (OSG) User School was held at the University of Wisconsin–Madison on June 24–27, 2013. The OSG provided a four-day training program that focused on hands-on activities and direct interactions with OSG staff, XSEDE staff, and local STEM researchers who use large-scale computation. Students had access to the same large computing systems that researchers use and were led through the entire process of turning research goals into actual computational workflows, then running them to completion. Students ran hundreds or even thousands of jobs throughout the week, encountering and learning to deal with a variety of real-life technical challenges that are common to this area. The program built a foundation for future application, learning, and development by involving students directly in the fundamentals of the field. Purely academic topics were kept to a minimum, and even then, build upon the contextually situated, hands-on experiences. This approach prepared students not only for existing technologies but also for future ones. The OSG School trained 22 students from many different U.S. academic institutions. The students came from a diverse range of disciplines, including aeronautics, civil and electrical engineering, physics, chemistry, radiology, statistics, and geography. Formal and informal metrics show that the School was a success. Further, many students continued the computational aspects of their scholarly work following the School, thereby demonstrating the impact of the School.
