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News Release

Cornell NSF Research Experiences for Undergraduates remote summer positions available
$7,700 stipends available to Cornell undergraduates for 10-week remote positions


Contact: Paul Redfern
Cell: (607) 227-1865

FOR RELEASE: March 30, 2020

ITHACA, NY – The Cornell University Center for Advanced Computing (CAC) has 4 National Science Foundation-funded Research Experiences for Undergraduates (REU) positions available for summer 2020, each with a $7,700 student stipend. All positions will be performed remotely.

The 10-week positions are focused on developing cloud computing solutions for science use cases that are an integral part of the Cornell-led, NSF-funded Aristotle Cloud Federation project. See the science use cases at https://federatedcloud.org for research highlights. Undergraduate students are encouraged to apply for the opportunities listed below as soon as possible. The exact period of employment may be negotiated to fit schedules, but will, in most cases, be late May through mid-August. Student applications are due Friday, April 17, 2019.

  • High Fidelity Modeling and Analytics for Improved Understanding of Climate-Relevant Properties: Professor Sara C. Pryor, Cornell Earth and Atmospheric Sciences – in recent decades a number of devastating extreme windstorms have impacted the northeastern US. Thus, there is tremendous interest in improved understanding of the dynamics of the storms and how they might evolve in the future. The production of actionable climate science relies on effective communication of regional climate information and its associated uncertainties across sectors. To be of value projections must be sufficiently credible, understandable, and useful for the particular decisions that need to be made. The selected student will conduct research within a project funded by the U.S. DOE. They will help identify and characterize historical “windstorms” using geospatial statistical analyses and/or perform analyses designed to determine the skill with which the Weather Research and Forecasting (WRF) model simulates those events and the sensitivity of simulation fidelity to the model configuration. The student will thus gain understanding of big data analytics and numerical simulations. The skills that will be applied and enhanced are analytics and big data, applied meteorology, mesoscale and microscale modeling, MATLAB programming, and cloud computing. Eligible students will have some experience in atmospheric science/fluid dynamics courses, MATLAB, and an interest in high-performance computing. See the science use case. To apply, email your resume and course transcript to Professor Pryor.
  • Transient Detection in Radio Astronomy Search Data: Professor James Cordes, Cornell Dept. of Astronomy – the REU student will design, develop, and deploy flexible scientific algorithms within a software pipeline for processing large quantities of radio astronomy data with the goal of discovering Fast Radio Bursts (FRBs). The student will help improve and expand the scientific capability of the FRB pipeline which may include implementing and validating new algorithms, parallelization of searches, statistical analysis of candidates, and visualization. The student will work with various datasets including 500TBs of high time-resolution radio data hosted by the CAC from the PALFA survey for pulsars, conducted at the Arecibo Radio Observatory, and the Breakthrough Listen Search for Intelligent Life datasets to which Professor Cordes has access. Successful algorithms will be added to the pipeline and deployed in cloud computing environments to search for FRBs in a variety of datasets. Due to the fact that the software is open source, the contributions to the software will not only have the potential for short-term detections, but also in assisting the greater scientific community in future searches. The recruited student will have an interest in Astronomy research and training in the underlying physical science, but need not have extensive experience with computational research. See the science use case. To apply, email your resume and course transcript to Professor Cordes and CAC Computational Scientist Adam Brazier.
  • Cloud Computing for Science Research: Adam Brazier, Brandon Barker, Pete Vaillancourt, and Bennett Wineholt, Cornell Center for Advanced Computing – the selected student will assist in developing containers and container-related system monitoring software using Docker, Terraform, Ansible, and other tools. The student will work on identifying performance bottlenecks of existing science use cases, implementing monitoring to identify system inefficiencies on a variety of private and public cloud platforms. CAC staff will advise the student on developing easy wins when parallelizing application architectures in order to alleviate bottlenecks and reduce the cost of deploying common application patterns. Terraform will be used to automate the provisioning of multi-VM jobs and Ansible will be used to configure, monitor, and run jobs on these systems. The student will also be required to write documentation as a result of their work and exploration. The student will have some experience in working with Linux or Unix-like systems and be interested in containerization and cloud systems. To apply, email your resume and course transcript to CAC Computational Scientist Dr. Adam Brazier.
  • Accelerated Computing for Science Research: Adam Brazier, Brandon Barker, Pete Vaillancourt, and Bennett Wineholt, Cornell Center for Advanced Computing – the student will assist in deploying and developing high performance GPU applications on public and private cloud systems. Technologies used will include Docker, Terraform, and NVIDIA driver tools. The student will work on implementing and benchmarking known GPU application code for scientific applications on specific cloud systems. Docker will be used for application deployment using common settings, Terraform will be used for rapid system deployment in various cloud contexts, and NVIDIA driver tools will provide system settings and monitoring to adjust for better performance outcomes. Application performance will be compared between various systems, including available private and public cloud instance types using diverse system settings with a focus on cost performance. The student will also need to write documentation as a result of their work and exploration, noting the tools and processes best suited to get started as a researcher using an accelerated computing system. The student will have some experience in working with Linux or Unix-like systems and be interested in accelerated computing. To apply, email your resume and course transcript to CAC Computational Scientist Dr. Adam Brazier.

Successful REU applicants will be formally employed by the Center for Advanced Computing and will be compensated in 3 installments. The research activities will be undertaken remotely in collaboration with the respective Cornell departments and Adam Brazier who is the Aristotle Science Use Case Lead. Please note that REU students must comply with the following National Science Foundation requirement: "Undergraduate students supported by NSF funds must be citizens or permanent residents of the United States or its possessions."

The Aristotle Cloud Federation project is supported by NSF grant no. OAC-1541215 and the Cornell University Center for Advanced Computing (CAC) in partnership with the University of Buffalo Center for Computational Research (CCR) and the University of California, Santa Barbara (UCSB) Department of Computer Science. Current industry collaborators include Amazon Web Services, Dell, Globus, Flexera, Google Cloud, HPE, Microsoft Azure, and Red Hat. The principal investigator is David Lifka, Cornell’s Vice President for Information Technologies and Chief Information Officer, and CAC Director.