Feb. 14, 2022 — The 2022 Pawsey Intern Showcase has marked the completion of another successful Summer Internship Program and demonstrated again the immense talent and potential emerging in the field of supercomputing.

The virtual conference celebrated the work and achievements of this year’s cohort following the completion of a ten-week internship program.

Pawsey’s annual internship program, open to 3rd year through to Masters’ students, is designed to develop skills through immersion in computational science and research projects.

This year, we were delighted to welcome 46 Interns and Intern Associates to contribute to a variety of challenging and interesting projects, with interns partnering with dozens of investigators and supervisors around the country.

We are particularly pleased with the growth in interest for our program, which was completed remotely, to promote student diversity.

More than 350 applicants from 30 universities applied for the hotly contested places, which included a placement of our first Indigenous intern.

After expanding the support model for all interns, this year also saw a significant increase in the number and diversity of universities and institutions who submitted intern projects and who agreed to co-fund the students. Our final cohort drew on project submissions from over 18 universities and institutions across Australia.

The selected intern projects needed to show that their projects would make a significant impact and/or contribution to scientific computing and/or scientific research and/or to an area of strategic importance to Pawsey. Students were then matched to projects based on skills required by the successful projects.

This year’s projects included

• Privacy-aware Distributed Deep Learning Models for Credit Card Fraud Detection
• GPU acceleration for antihydrogen formation calculation
• Molecular dynamics simulation of deep Earth fluids
• Microstructure characterisation of cementitious materials via deep learning
• Accelerating the search for extra-terrestrial intelligence
• And many, many more.

We also drew on the experience of previous Pawsey Interns through the expansion of the Pawsey Intern Mentors program. This program employs previous Pawsey Interns and/or Pawsey affiliates who have first hand “lived” the Pawsey internship and who are users of the Pawsey systems. Beside answering the 100s of technical questions posed by interns, the mentors built an extensive library of resources in the form of an internship knowledge base. This evolving knowledge base helps interns with technical skills such as coding, scheduling, and profiling as well as introduces soft/essential skills, such as diversity and inclusion.

The Pawsey Summer Internship program runs during the Australian University Summer break.

Registration details for the 2023 program will be announced during Q3 2022. You can become a Pawsey Friend and stay up to date with this and other several other Pawsey outreach opportunities.

About the Pawsey Supercomputing Centre

The Pawsey Centre is a world-class high-performance computing facility accelerating scientific discoveries for Australia’s researchers. Named for Australian scientist Joseph Pawsey, known as one of the pioneers of Australian radio astronomy for his work in the field of interferometry, the Centre enables science and accelerates discovery, by contributing to the delivery of globally important research. Pawsey is currently serving over 40 organizations and achieving unprecedented results, in domains such as radio astronomy, energy and resources, engineering, bioinformatics and health sciences.

The Pawsey Centre is an unincorporated joint venture of CSIRO – Australia’s national science agency, Curtin University, Edith Cowan University, Murdoch University and The University of Western Australia.

The Pawsey Capital Refresh project is supported by the Australian Government through a $70 million grant. Pawsey is also supported by the Australian Government under the National Collaborative Research Infrastructure Strategy (NCRIS) and related programs through the Department of Education.

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Source: Pawsey Supercomputing Centre