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Meet Your Mentor!
We sat down with our 2024 Anvil REU Mentors to discuss their role at RCAC, what their REU students will be working on, and much, much more. Keep reading below to learn more about your mentor.
Guangzhen Jin
Please introduce yourself:
My name is Guangzhen Jin, and I am a senior computational scientist at RCAC. I'm also serving as a mentor for the Anvil REU project this year.
What’s one thing you wish you’d known when you started working in HPC?
How we work together with users to solve their issues.
What’s one professional skill you’re currently working on?
Matlab
What’s your go-to productivity trick?
To keep excellent documentation of everything that I do. It helps with efficiency when you need to try and figure out where something went wrong.
What behavior or personality trait do you most attribute your success to, and why?
Enthusiasm.
What was your favorite job you’ve ever had and why?
This current job is my favorite because I always enjoy working with researchers from different backgrounds, which is what I typically end up doing day-to-day.
What are you currently excited about in your job?
I love facing different challenges every day and working with a group of experts to solve them.
What’s one thing that surprised you about working at RCAC?
How supportive group members are. It has been a wonderful work environment.
What’s the biggest misconception people have about your position?
We are always available to support them 24/7.
How long have you been on the Anvil team/at RCAC?
2 years.
What do you hope the REU gets out of the program?
Experience with HPC, and hopefully, a starting point for larger projects rather than just one-summer thing. The students can gain a lot of HPC knowledge thanks to having access to great resources and teamwork. They will also develop abilities in the area of research computing, as well as data analysis, which is beneficial for their professional career.
What will your REU student(s) be working on specifically?
Our REU students will be working on developing an easy-to-use dashboard that pulls user information such as storage quotas, job status, and performance data from various sources on Anvil and makes it available on the Anvil Open OnDemand web interface. This will not just lower the barrier to entry to finding this information for users who are new to HPC, but also enable users to inspect trends over time and modify their workflows accordingly.
Why HPC?
Within industry, high-performance computing has been one of the most popular and important fields for fulfilling different kinds of work, including data analysis, AI, and ML. And as for research, most of the science-related research, both now and in the foreseeable future, will rely on the power of supercomputers. As an undergraduate, gaining experience in HPC can be beneficial for career opportunities, advanced research, personal development, and collaborative learning.
Why RCAC/Purdue?
Purdue has one of the most powerful supercomputers—Anvil—as well as other great HPC platforms. RCAC is a great organization that has done great jobs in cluster management, user support, and research facilitating.
