Graduate Research Fellows Cyberinfrastructure Resources Workshop

University Of Illinois At Urbana-Champaign, Urbana IL

Investigators

Abstract

John Towns UIUC ? NCSA OCI 0750408 As advanced computing, data and visualization resources are developed and integrated through the deployment of national and international cyberinfrastructures such as the TeraGrid, the potential to enhance research productivity among our STEM workforce is unprecedented. The workshop proposed here is an opportunity to capitalize on this cyberinfrastructure development through the, NSF?s Graduate Research Fellowship Program (GRFP) effort to modernize its supercomputer access program. The opportunities for exciting successes of Graduate Research Fellows already exist. By heightening awareness of the resources and services available and by making incremental improvements in those services and their accessibility, these nascent successes can be realized. Incremental improvements in services would include a larger allocation of computing time, access to imaging and database resources, more efficient training of CI use, and information on gateways and software availability. The enhancement of science and engineering training programs through these increased CI services offers an unparalleled opportunity to advance research productivity and creativity in the United States? future STEM workforce. Realization of these advances requires an increased awareness of CI resource availability and an understanding of CI protocols and methodology among these rising STEM researchers. One particularly important but largely untapped emerging STEM workforce audience that would benefit from the enhanced research productivity of CI is the more than 3000 active NSF Graduate Research Fellows. The GRFP is one of the oldest and most recognizable programs at the National Science Foundation [2 ]. Since 1952, over 43,000 graduate students in the STEM disciplines have been supported by the GRFP, which provides three years of stipend and cost of education support for the early stages of graduate study. Additional assistance for international travel is provided to all students as well as access to supercomputing time at one of the NSF-supported supercomputer facilities. Another highly capable group of early career STEM workers is the almost 2000 recipients of Graduate Research Fellows Honorable Mention that are identified each year. These highly capable graduate students constitute a cadre of some of our most promising STEM researchers in the formative stages of their careers and are well positioned to benefit from increased access to state of the art research tools. Despite a long-standing program of supercomputer access for Graduate Research Fellows, participation rates in the supercomputer access program remain low for lack of a modern perspective on high performance computing and awareness of the broad scope of computing resources that constitute CI. To address this shortcoming, we propose a cyber-enabled workshop to introduce Graduate Research Fellows and Honorable Mention recipients to the large array of NSF-supported CI resources and how they can use these resources to enhance and transform their research activities. The workshop will be conducted using the Access Grid (a component of CI) at multiple locations ? some within close proximity to over 300 current Graduate Research Fellows and Honorable Mention recipients. These workshops will provide: a) an overview of CI and its components b) examples of how students and others have used CI to enhance their research c) a description of CI resources available to them through the GRF Program d) information on how to apply for access to CI resources. The proposed workshop will help the GRFP?s efforts to build human capacity among Graduate Research Fellows by increasing awareness of the research opportunities afforded through CI. The workshop will draw on other experiences gained by NCSA in providing an integrated spectrum of computational science education and training in the use of tools and resources, for science and math education at all level