9322321 Guckenheimer The National Science Foundation's initiative in high performance computing has had a tremendous impact on scientific opportunities for the national research community. The Theory Center's Supercomputing Program for Undergraduate Research (SPUR) complements this initiative by extending the opportunities of computational research to undergraduate students. By providing students with an early research experience, this program is an effective mean of motivating students to pursue careers and graduate education in mathematics, science, and engineering. Through this program, undergraduate students will investigate problems in an area of computational science research under the joint guidance of a Cornell University faculty member and a member of the Cornell Theory Center's scientific and technical staff. While working on their research projects, the students will not only participate in scientific research but will also learn about computational methods and receive training in high performance computing techniques. The research projects will take advantage of the advanced computational tools of the Theory Center, including the use of scalable parallel processing and visualization tools. The research experience will be enhanced by the interaction among students from diverse institutions with multidisciplinary backgrounds and research projects. Building on longstanding relationships, the Center will aggressively recruit from historically black colleges and women's colleges and also target thoseinstitutions which lack a strong research orientation. Students at colleges and universities with otherwise limited computational research resources will thus have the opportunity to undertake significant research projects as part of their undergraduate education.
