Undergraduate Research Challenge Internship Program

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Kennicott Glacier, near McCarthy, Alaska. Photo by Tim Stallard

DEADLINE FOR SUMMER INTERNSHIPS
(The application date for summer 2008 has passed.)

The Alaska Research Summer Challenge is a summer intern program for undergraduate students from U.S. universities to spend the summer in Alaska at the University of Alaska Fairbanks. Interns work under the direction of the Program Manager at the Arctic Region Supercomputing Center (ARSC) and are assigned projects where they work under the day-to-day mentorship of individual researchers on active research projects. These mentors are composed of senior staff and faculty members. Major objectives are to promote interests in arctic research, develop research skills, and become familiar with modern supercomputing. Minority students are particularly encouraged to apply.

In 2007, projects included the following:

Interactive Visualizations of Geophysical Phenomena and Computational Output
Weather Events in Alaska and Montana
Distributed and Parallel Path Planning in Massive Graphs
Grid Information Retrieval
Supercomputing Benchmarking and Performance
An Embedded Buoy-Based System to Measure Atmospheric Gasses
Development of a Parallel Ice Sheet Model
Graphical Presentation of Hot Spots in Alaska
Mesoscale Simulation of Boundary Layer Cycles During Haze Events in the Arctic Summer

Areas of interest for projects in 2008 include, but are not limited to, the following:

Weather: Building on its twice-daily Alaska forecast, utilized directly by the National Weather Service and others, there is both a practical and a research focus on ARSC’s use of the WRF model.
Smoke and fire: Due to heavy recent wildfire seasons, ARSC has interests in tying together remote sensing, land surface models, and weather predictions to better understand smoke and fire behavior. These products will be useful for wildfire fighting and mitigation.
Climate study and the water cycle: This is a major utilization area for ARSC’s supercomputers, and addressed by numerous campus researchers.
Benchmarking/performance: ARSC is not just a consumer of large-scale systems, but also a center actively engaged in acquiring, evaluating and understanding next-generation computing technologies. Interns gain early access to such technologies, and assist mentors in communicating findings.
Integrated modeling: Arctic Systems Model (ASM) under development at UAF addresses boundary layers, model coupling, and other challenges in bringing domain-specific models (such as sea ice, ocean currents, and the atmosphere) together.
Acceleration technologies: Experience with technologies to get more computational power from emerging areas of importance. Hands-on programming and evaluation of the cell processor, multi-core CPUs, graphics processing units (GPUs), and field-programmable gate arrays (FPGAs).

Program Dates: Monday June 9, 2008 through Friday August 15, 2008

Application Deadline: (The application date for summer 2008 has passed.)

ARSC Decision Date: Monday March 24, 2008, 5:00 pm AKDT

Applicant Commitment Date: Monday April 7, 2008, 5:00 pm AKDT

Arctic Region Supercomputing Center
PO Box 756020, Fairbanks, AK 99775 | voice: 907-450-8600 | email: