REU Site: EXERCISE - Explore Emerging Computing in Science and Engineering

Salisbury University, Salisbury MD

Investigators

Abstract

The project is a renewal of the Research Experiences for Undergraduates (REU) EXERCISE (Explore Emerging Computing in Science and Engineering) site at Salisbury University (SU) for the next three years. The goal of the project is to offer student participants, particularly those from primarily undergraduate institutions (PUIs), a valuable research experience in parallel computing¬. The project consists of two components: an online pre-program workshop each spring and an on-site research program every summer. The spring workshop will prepare students with background knowledge in parallel computing and help them develop interest in research projects to be conducted in the summer. In the summer research program, students will work with their faculty mentors to carry out well-designed undergraduate research projects via a comprehensive approach that combines theory, algorithm, implementation, analysis, simulation, and experiment. A dedicated computing research lab is reserved for the summer program. Field trips, social activities, and graduate school application information sessions are planned. The host institution SU will collaborate with University of Maryland Eastern Shore, a historically black college and university (HBCU), and the University of Maryland College Park for multi-disciplinary faculty expertise and summer activities. The EXERCISE project will continue to promote “parallel thinking,” an important computational thinking skill, and further contribute parallel computing resources to education and research communities, including PUIs with limited high performance computing facilities and curricula. The PI, together with a group of faculty mentors from diverse backgrounds, will encourage student researchers to explore parallel computing through parallel algorithms, concurrent software, and multi-core architectures. They will tackle data and compute intensive problems in the selected science and engineering application areas such as public health and global epidemics, sustainable aquaculture farming, human activity recognition, topological data analysis, and computational fluid dynamics. Students will have opportunities to solve real-world problems with emerging parallel computing paradigms such as MapReduce and GPU computing. The renewal REU site plans to prioritize recruiting under-represented and female students, and attract students from local HBCUs, PUIs, and community colleges on Maryland’s Eastern Shore into computational science and engineering majors and the general Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM) fields. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.