Purdue University

Three undergraduate students spent their summer break getting hands-on experience with high-performance computing, thanks to a Research Experiences for Undergraduates program run by the Rosen Center for Advanced Computing (RCAC).

The students worked on a variety of projects for RCAC including benchmarking systems such as Purdue’s new $10 million NSF-funded Anvil supercomputer, monitoring cluster usage and testing to see how well scientific applications were running on the clusters.

“The projects that they had us working on were as real as it gets,” says Lucas Snyder, a junior studying intelligent systems engineering at Indiana University. “This is stuff we don’t learn in class.”

Larkin Nickle, a senior in computer information and technology at Purdue, worked on setting up a power draw monitoring system RCAC needed to analyze which systems were drawing the most power and when.

Nickle, who is continuing to work with RCAC on a part-time basis this year, says he highly recommends the internship program to fellow students.

Erik Gough, lead computational scientist for RCAC, served as a mentor to the students, although they had the opportunity to work with a number of RCAC staff members on various projects.

“I appreciated how much trust Erik put in us,” says Snyder. “He gave us a lot of freedom to get the projects done.”

Nrushad Joshi, a junior in intelligent systems engineering at IU, also participated in the program.

Writer: Adrienne Miller, science and technology writer, Rosen Center for Advanced Computing, mill2027@purdue.edu.