Schedule & Events in 2019 Summer

About this REU Site

This 3-year Research Experience for Undergraduate (REU) site will be focused on High Performance Computing (HPC), a field critical to national security, scientific discovery, and technological innovation. The goal of this project is to encourage 30 talented undergraduate students to pursue graduate study and careers in HPC by engaging them in exciting, ongoing research projects and by cultivating their talents during ten-week summer research experiences and beyond. Sixteen ongoing research projects available for students are innovative and share the common theme of societally relevant engineering applications that originate from disciplines as diverse as aeronautical engineering, chemical engineering, civil engineering, electrical and computer engineering, software engineering, and applied mathematics. The project thus serves the national interest, as stated by NSF's mission: to promote the progress of science; to advance the national health, prosperity and welfare; or to secure the national defense.

Students are recruited from institutions that offer limited or no research opportunities in HPC, such as historically minority colleges and universities. Faculties with expertise in HPC applications mentor the students to be researchers and provide them with specialized training in the design and development of HPC applications that are rooted in and motivated by engaging engineering innovations. This specialized training provides the students with technical and analytical skills in mathematical modeling, algorithmic development, and parallel and distributed programming, which benefit them in future pursuits such as graduate study or industry work. The quality of this training is further reinforced by additional professional development activities, including an HPC crash course, field trips, invited speakers, weekly group meetings, and a mentor training workshop for faculty. Seminars in career development, literature search, technical writing, and graduate school advisement, are also integrated into the program, and all student participants are given the opportunity to attend and present in professional conferences.

Program Objective

• Engage a total of 10 students annually from traditionally underrepresented groups or colleges and universities with limited research opportunities and immerse students in ongoing research projects in HPC-related engineering fields;
  
  
• Cultivate talented students to effectively plan, conduct, and communication scientific research through meaningful and engaging research projects, close and effective mentoring, weekly group meetings, mentor training, and public presentations;
  
  
• Improve educational pathways to advanced HPC-related careers through student involvement in field trips, invited speakers, and additional professional development activities.
  

Important Dates and Deadline

Application Deadline: Monday, March 25, 2019

Final Date for Selection or Declination: Monday, April 1, 2019

REU Participants Arrive on Campus: Sunday, May 26, 2019

REU Program starts: Monday, May 27, 2019

SURE Conference: Friday, July 26, 2019

Final Day of REU Program: Friday, August 2, 2019

Participant Activities

• Orientation & Team Building: Welcome the students and to familiarize them with the REU team and with each other. Various speakers, including Dean of School of Engineering and research mentors, will welcome the students. High ropes course at Camp Oswegatchie for team building;
  
  
• HPC Crash Course: To cover all three major HPC programming paradigms with hands-on lab exercises carefully designed to help reinforce concepts and consolidate learning;
  
  
• Weekly Research Group Meetings: To provide an authentic environment to stimulate peer learning and exposure to the broader set of projects, to experience the research process in a structured context, and to hone skills in both poster and oral presentation;
  
  
• Research Projects: Majority of the projects will be guided by experienced research faculty. See the project list at Research Projects;
  
  
• Field Trips: Two technical field trips organized for the REU cohort, including IBM's Poughkeepsie, NY facility and Canadian Nuclear Laboratories;
  
  
• Professional Development Activities: Seminars from invited speakers, professional development seminars, and workshops (e.g., Ph.D. pathways, graduate school application process, secrets of a great personal statement, Ph.D. dissertation research, managing your faculty mentor, poster development, and public speaking).
  

Research Projects & Mentors (Tentative)

Mentor, Department	Projects
Dr. Steven Wojtkiewicz, Civil and Environmental Engineering	1. Holistic vibration energy harvesting in structural systems. See Project Description; 2. EAGER/Collaborative Research: Aeroelastic real-time hybrid simulation for wind engineering experimentation. See Project Description; 3. CDS&E/Collaborative Research: A new framework for computational model validation. See Project Description.
Dr. Yuncheng Du, Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering	Uncertainty quantication and propagation for improving reliability of cardiac modeling and simulation. See Project Description.
Dr. Brian Helenbrook, Mechanical and Aeronautical Engineering	3D CFD code for high-order accurate direct numerical simulations of single and multi-phase flow. See Project Description.
Dr. Mahesh Banavar, Electrical and Computer Engineering	Multi-dimensional scaling (MDS) based SLAM solutions (Simultaneous Localization and Room Mapping). See Project Description.
Dr. Ming-Cheng Cheng, Electrical and Computer Engineering	1. A reduced-order thermal model for thermal aware architecture design exploration of semiconductor chips. See Project Description; 2. A design methodology for electromagnetic and photonic band gap devices. See Project Description.
Dr. Jeremie Fish, Electrical and Computer Engineering	Network dynamics with distributed computing. See Project Description.
Dr. Daqing Hou, Electrical and Computer Engineering	Utilizing GPUs to speed up causation entropy modeling. See Project Description.
Dr. Faraz Hussain, Electrical and Computer Engineering	Benchmarking concurrent algorithms across parallel computing platforms. See Project Description.
Dr. Yu Liu, Electrical and Computer Engineering	1. Multi-physics HPC framework for engineering computing. See Project Description; 2. Investigating an OpenCL task scheduler for GPU-CPU heterogeneous architectures. See Project Description; 3. Compiler optimizations for exploiting data locality and parallelism of engineering computing on single chip CPU and GPU heterogenous system. See Project Description.
Dr. Erik Bollt & Dr. Jie Sun, Applied Mathematics & Electrical and Computer Engineering	Analysis of spatiotemporal dynamical systems from multi-attribute remote sensing

Accommodations & Travel

Stipend:

Participants will receive a research work stipend ($5,000) and a food stipend ($20 per day plus free Friday lunch) for this 10-week program.

Housing:

Housing will be provided by Clarkson's university housing, and there is no cost to the participants. Detailed plan and location are subject to the summer renovation and improvement of Clarkson University housing, and will be announced once it has been finalized.

Travel & Field Trip:

Participants can reimburse up to $600 moving cost. Several interesting field trips will be arranged for the participants paid by this program. These trips include Canadian Nuclear Laboratories at Chalk River, Ontario, Canada (Note: passports are required for this trip), IBM's Poughkeepsie facility at Poughkeepsie, New York, etc.

Eligibility & Application