This funding renews a highly successful CISE Research Experiences for Undergraduates (REU) site at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign that is focused on parallel computing. The transition to "parallelism as the default" will be a change in the computing landscape of the magnitude of the introduction of the Internet. A central challenge in this transition is a shortage of people with expertise in parallelism. This site will train students in the basics of parallel programming, provide them with application-centric research experiences that demonstrate to them the qualitative impact that parallelism can have on computing applications, and help them develop the confidence that they need to be successful in graduate school. The host institution (UIUC) is well known as a center of parallel computing research and will provide an excellent environment for the REU students to learn about the application of parallelism to a range of scientific and computational problems.
This site will provide the opportunity for 30 undergraduate students (over three years) to develop essential skills in parallel programming in an application-focused research context and to develop a network of mentors, role models, and peers to inform and advise them about performing research, careers in research, and graduate school. A major motivation for the site is improving the retention of women in the sciences, and the PIs have various strategies for addressing this goal. The PIs will disseminate what they learn about engaging women in computer science research, and will also encourage and facilitate publication by the participating students and their mentors.
