This grant provides funding for an internship and mentoring program for graduate students in engineering at the San Diego Supercomputer Center (SDSC) at the University of California, San Diego (UCSD). The project is designed to encourage doctoral students to incorporate CI tools in their research and to build peer communities to further expand the use of CI tools in their field. Following an introductory workshop covering the wide applications and uses of CI tools in research, engineering graduate students will be paired with scientists at SDSC with expertise in engineering and parallel programming. Their summer internships will focus on exploring and adapting CI and high performance computing (HPC) tools for the student's thesis research. E-mentoring will continue through the academic year, culminating with student presentations in spring 2008 for faculty, mentors, student peers, and NSF program officers highlighting internship results. Coupled with a parallel award through Biology, this project allows evaluation of two models for introducing graduate students to CI and HPC resources applicable to their research. The two models will be compared for scalability, success in building graduate students' CI skills, and ability to create a sustained community of peers.
If the program is successful, graduate students will request allocations on the nation's scientific HPC resources, incorporate high performance computing into their thesis research, and share their new CI knowledge with their professors and fellow students when they return to their home institutions. Additionally, the teams of interns will form domain-based communities of practice that will encourage others to explore the value of CI tools for the field. Comparison of the two internship models' results will help NSF determine the most cost effective approach to building CI-savvy researchers in science and engineering. Results and recommendations for further internship programs will be shared throughout the national TeraGrid partner organizations.
