Comprising one half of the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) Leadership Computing Facility, the Argonne Leadership Computing Facility (ALCF) operates a supercomputer 10 to 100 times more powerful than the typical research computing system and puts it to work solving the world’s largest and most complex problems. But ALCF is also an institution of learning that has helped inspire and launch numerous HPC careers.

Preparing the next generation of HPC processionals is a big part of ALCF’s mission, and this extends to ALCF’s popular summer program.

As Argonne writer Jim Collins reports, the 2015 summer program was the largest yet with 24 students ranging from college freshmen to PhD candidate

Students in the summer program are provided the opportunity to work directly with mentors on real-world research projects. Every year, staff members who are interested in mentoring can solicit student research proposals. The highlight of the program is a special symposium in which the students present their project results.

“We have students working with things like RAM disks and data visualization, which can be very attractive to research organizations as well as the big tech companies,” said ALCF Director Michael E. Papka, who is also an associate professor of computer science at Northern Illinois University.

“It’s a win-win situation,” Papka added. “The students gain valuable experience collaborating with researchers in a national laboratory environment. We get to support education and we benefit from the insights they uncover along the way.”

Students access the summer training via the Science Undergraduate Laboratory Internship (SULI) program (funded by the DOE Office of Science’s Office of Workforce Development for Teachers and Scientists), or through Argonne’s Research Aide Appointments and Student Research Participation Program (both are supported by the ALCF and DOE’s Advanced Scientific Computing Research program).

This year’s projects, listed below, reflect a wide array of relevant HPC topics.

Alex Ballmer
Education: BS (Spring 2018), Computer Science, Illinois Institute of Technology
Mentor: William Scullin
Project: Automating the Build Process of HPC Applications

Regan Brown
Education: BS (Spring 2016) Computer Science, Elmhurst College
Mentor: Ray Loy
Project: Parallel Debugging on Blue Gene/Q: A Performance Perspective

Johnny Bui
Education: BS (Spring 2018), Computer Engineering, University of Illinois at Chicago
Mentor: Hal Finkel
Project: Systematic Development of a Loop Benchmark Suite for the Evaluation of Current and Future HPC Hardware and Compilers

Cameron Christensen
Education: MS (Fall 2015), Computing – Graphics & Visualization, University of Utah
Mentor: Venkat Vishwanath
Project: Efficacy of Cloud‐Based Data‐Centric Frameworks for HPC Data Analysis

Alex Findlater
Education: PhD (Spring 2016), Physical Chemistry, Iowa State University
Mentors: Yuri Alekseev, Graham Fletcher, and Spencer Pruitt
Project: Performance of Matrix Operations in GAMESS

Barry Greengus
Education: BS (Spring 2017) Computer Science, University of Illinois at Chicago
Mentor: Bill Allcock
Project: A Performance Analysis of a RAM Area Network

Amina Hussein
Education: MS (Spring 2015) Nuclear Engineering, Purdue University
Mentor: Vitali Morozov
Project: Automatic Skeleton Generation for Scientific Codes

Jie Jiang
Education: PhD (Fall 2017), Industrial Engineering, University of Illinois at Chicago
Mentor: Silvio Rizzi
Project: Exploration of Multiple Streaming from vl3 to Tiled Display

Kristopher Keipert
Education: PhD (Fall 2017), Physical Chemistry, Iowa State University
Mentors: Yuri Alekseev, Graham Fletcher, and Spencer Pruitt
Project: Performance of Matrix Operations in GAMESS

Michael Lewis
Education: PhD (Spring 2016) Computer Science, University of Illinois at Chicago
Mentor: Preeti Malakar
Project: Optimizing Read Times for Multidimensional Datasets in S3D Application

Xiayue (Patrick) Li
Education: BS (Spring 2017), Physics, Math and English, Tulane University
Mentor: Alvaro Vazquez‐Mayagoitia
Project: Predicting Molecular Crystal Structure with High‐Throughput Design of Genetic Algorithm on Mira

Phil Lindner
Education: MS (Fall 2016), Computer Science, Northern Illinois University
Mentors: Michael E. Papka and Venkat Vishwanath
Project: Investigating Event Handling Mechanisms and Control Stream Metadata in the Context of M‐to‐N Network Data Transfers

Amrut Marathe
Education: MS (Fall 2015), Computer Science, Northern Illinois University
Mentor: Doug Waldron
Project: Analysis of the Node Failures in High‐Performance Computing Systems

Santoshi Nanagare
Education: MS (Summer 2015), Computer Science, Northern Illinois University
Mentor: Doug Waldron
Project: Application Development for ALCF’s User Experience Team

Adolfo Rodriguez
Education: MS (Winter 2015), Computer Science, Northern Illinois University
Mentor: Tom Uram
Project: Understanding Machine Learning with High Energy Physics Data

Min Shih
Education: PhD (Summer 2016), Computer Science, University of California at Davis
Mentor: Joe Insley
Project: Advanced Rendering in vl3

Luis Antonio Soriano Agueda
Education: PhD (2017), Chemistry, Universidad Autonoma Metropolitana-Iztapalapa
Mentor: Alvaro Vazqez-Mayagoitia
Project: NWChem/SEMO

Joe Sortino
Education: BS (Spring 2015), Computer Science, North Central College
Mentors: Tom Uram
Project: Volume Rendering as a Service

Judah Unmuth‐Yockey
Education: PhD (Spring 2016), Lattice Field Theory, University of Iowa
Mentor: James Osborn
Project: TRG Method for the O(2) Spin Model

Ben Walters
Education: BS (Spring 2016) Computer Science, Illinois Institute of Technology
Mentor: Bill Allcock
Project: A Performance Analysis of a RAM Area Network

Roger Xiao
Education: BS (Spring 2016), Computer Engineering, University of Illinois at Urbana‐Champaign
Mentor: Kevin Harms
Project: Evaluation of IBM exFLASH Memory

Adam Young
Education: MS (Summer 2015) Computer Science, Northern Illinois University
Mentor: Michael E. Papka
Project: Holistic Visualization of High‐Performance Computing Facilities

Xingwu Zheng
Education: PhD (Summer 2016), Electrical Engineering, Illinois Institute of Technology
Mentor: Vitali Morozov
Project: Exploring the Opportunities for Data Staging in HPC Workloads

Zhou Zhou
Education: PhD (Winter 2015), Computer Science, Illinois Institute of Technology
Mentor: Paul Rich
Project: Planning and Optimization in Cobalt Resource Manager