This page contains brief reports and photos of special events
the REU Site hosted or participated in.
Welcome Meeting
Sunday, 06/15/2014, 05:00pm-07:00pm
All participants, graduate students, and PIs met over sandwich and soda.
The teams formed and started the process of getting to know each other.
Drs. Neerchal and Gobbert discussed the philosophy of the program,
with its team building while learning parallel computing,
research projects as team, and the integrated professional development
program that teaches how to conduct research.
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VIP meeting with
Dr. Freeman Hrabowski, President of UMBC
Thursday, 06/19/14, 02:00pm-02:30pm
Upon Dr. Hrabowski's arrival, you can feel the excitement and
anticipation to finally meet and greet the president
of University of Maryland, Baltimore County.
With his kind words of welcome and compliment,
he emphasized how important it was for our country
to have hardworking and dedicated individuals and
especially those involved in the HPC REU summer 2014.
Shortly after introducing himself he requested question
from the HPC REU participants.
Among those questions, one stood out that most expected a
very different answer than the one Dr. Hraboski gave.
The question was, "who are your role models?"
He answer very simply and without deep thought or pause,
"My students."
He saw his students and the students around him as the future of our world.
He seems to be highly inspired by the aspirations that we all look
to accomplish in our lives and inspiration propels him to do
better for himself, his family, and this world.
-- Kendall Queen
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Presentations by project clients
Thursday, 06/19/14, 02:30pm-05:30pm
Before the formal presentations by the potential project clients,
we had a coffee break in the lounge at 02:00pm to welcome all guests
to the program.
At the beginning of each talk, each presenter discussed very graciously
their career choices, which gave interesting insight into
options for research jobs.
The first presentation belonged to Dr. Ian Thorpe of UMBC's
Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry, and with it he set the bar
high. He started out very simple. He produced a nifty flowchart that
had a process in mind: We use math and physics to create and run
computer simulations that ultimately provide insight into chemical
and biological processes. And then things got more complicated. He
hopes to be able to efficiently (and effectively) identify motional
correlations in proteins, using many tests, including Generalized
Correlation Coefficients, and Distance Correlation Coefficients.
The second presentation was given by Mr. Samuel Khuvis, alongside his
mentor, Dr. Matthias Gobbert. Samuel, in a quiet but intellectual
demeanor, proceeded to wow the crowd with a complex presentation of
parallel computing on maya. He showed us data, mentioned its
limitations, as well as the sheer amount of recent changes, and
proceeded to describe our task. We were to compare our results to the
previous ones on C/MPI and Matlab, and explain the discrepancies. We
were to extend the study to 3-D, and extrapolate a conclusion to
compare to those found in 2-D testing. We were to attempt to use
GPU's with Matlab, C, and C/MPI. And much more. This was one heck of
a project.
When Dr. Marc Olano confessed to his love of theatre, no one was
surprised. Throughout his performance, he held the stage with humor
and passion, radiating his excitement for radiosity. He proposed a
very interesting idea that went against popular opinion. Rather than
using the standard of Monte Carlo Integration for graphic rendering,
he wondered if the ability to parallelize Radiosity (a rival
rendering technique) would result in faster frame rates at real-time,
and as a result would allow improvements to real-time simulations. He
proceeded to describe the linear algebra behind the calculations, and
provided examples of its effect, such as the Cornell Box. Before any
of us could ask how this would be done, his TA, Ms. Yu Wang, took the
stage and described the advantages of GPUs in parallel computing.
Overall, it was a very interesting presentation of an equally
compelling project.
The final presentation was given by our own mentor Dr. Neerchal, on
behalf of his biologist acquaintance. Dr. Neerchal's project pertains
to the distribution of ribosomal proteins of a cofactor phenotype.
The talk was actually very informative, as we learned about the
Wilcoxen Rank Sum Test, hypothesis testing, and optimal non-bipartite
matching. Overall, it was very interesting to not early learn about
the biology behind ribosomal distribution, but also to learn so much
about the statistical research procedure. Overall, the project asks a
team to write code in R that will test whether or not two samples are
(sufficiently) different from each other regarding their
distributions. It was a fantastic ending to the first presentation
day. I look forward to hearing the rest next week.
-- Alex Piatski
- 02:30-03:00
Dr. Ian Thorpe, Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry, UMBC
- 03:00-03:30
Samuel Khuvis and Dr. Matthias K. Gobbert, High Performance Computing Facility, UMBC
- 03:30-04:00 Coffee break
- 04:00-04:30
Yu Wang and Dr. Marc Olano,
Department of Computer Science and Electrical Engineering, UMBC
- 04:30-05:00
Dr. Nagaraj K. Neerchal, Department of Mathematics and Statistics, UMBC
- 06:00-08:00
We had dinner with the clients at Hunan Manor in Columbia.
We all learned some surprising things about all participants.
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VIP meeting with
Dr. Karl Steiner, Vice President for Research
Thursday, 06/19/14, 05:00pm-05:30pm
Karl Steiner, Vice President for Research at
the University of Maryland, Baltimore County (UMBC),
visited the High Performance Computing REU (HPC-REU),
introducing himself between project presentations to
current research participants.
Mr. Steiner reminded the REU participants of their important
role as technology students in an increasingly technology dominated world,
emphasizing the benefits of participating in an REU that focused on high
performance and statistics in computing.
He also outlined the other opportunities that are available to
UMBC students and researchers.
In particular, he discussed the university's excellent position
at the center of the technological hub along the
greater Baltimore-Washington area, pointing out that
Baltimore had the most technology jobs of any city in the nation.
In the same vein, Mr. Steiner pointed out that the
Baltimore-Washington corridor was unique in being home to
both large, government organizations (NSA, NIST, etc.)
and cutting-edge, private industries
(Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman, etc.).
-- Jack Slettebak
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Presentations by project clients
Thursday, 06/26/14, 02:00pm-04:30pm
The first presentation of the day was given by Dr. Thomas Salter of
the NSA's Advanced Computing Systems Research Program, with his
colleague Dr. David Mountain also in attendance. Dr. Salter's
proposed project involved testing benchmarks on Maya cluster to
characterize its performance on a variety of tasks. His talk was
quite informative, detailing how the preferred metrics of
benchmarking have changed over time, ranging from clock speed to
performance on a given level of power consumption. A computer system
might perform much better at certain tasks than others given its
specific architecture, so several benchmarks are required to better
characterize its performance. Perhaps the most surprising part of the
presentation was that the conjugate gradient method for solving
special systems of linear equations is now being used a benchmark:
this is precisely what we had been working on in class!
The second presentation was by Dr Amita Mehta from the Joint Center for
Earth Systems Technology.
The main objective of the project she is working on is to assess the impact
of climate variability, assessing
the change of water and their impact on agricultural production in the
Missouri River Basin (MRB) using climate model
downscaling and SWAT simulations.
She expects from the REU researchers to
implement code for visualizing climate model data from downscaling and
SWAT simulations;
implement R code for running climate downscaled algorithms, and
feeding the data to SWAT for simulations; and
parallelize these if possible.
The third presentation was by Margarett Watts and Arthur Sherman from the
National Institutes of Health.
This team of researchers focuses on modeling paracrine interaction in
pancreatic islets.
They are trying to come up with a model (tri-hormonal model) where the
alpla-cells, beta-cells and delta-cells
talk to each other in order to synchronize their activities.
Following is the role of each cell category.
The alpha-cells secrete glucogon to raise the glucose level back to the
"accepted" range.
The beta-cells secrete insuline.
The delta-cells secrete somatostatin to decease the glucose level back to the
"accepted" range.
The clients expect us to
model an islet with different proportions of apha-cells, beta-cells
and delta-cells;
investigate different arrangement of the islet in mouse versus humans; and
answer the question: "Do paracrine interactions tame heterogenity?"
Dr. Brian Smith of the Maryland Department of Natural Resources gave
another notable presentation covering the task of assessing water
quality in the Chesapeake Bay. The Chesapeake Bay is actually
America's largest estuary, and the Chesapeake Bay
watershed encompasses part of six states. After a discussion of the
Bay's characteristics, Dr. Smith deftly introduced the various
factors constituting what we think of as water quality, such as water
clarity, salinity, and the balance of
nutrients in the water. Several programs are in place to monitor
these factors, some by sampling the water periodically and others
taking continuous readings. With significant amounts of data having
been collected, the next natural step is to further explore the data
and statistically analyze it, providing the impetus for a substantive
project. Before closing, Dr. Smith divulged that there was also
demand for creating a tool to visualize the water quality data,
setting up the possibility of another type of interesting project.
-- Moise Mouyebe and Daniel Xie
- 02:00-02:30
Dr. Thomas Salter and Dr. David Mountain, Advanced Computing Systems Research Program
- 02:30-03:00
Dr. Amita Mehta, Research Assistant Professor
Joint Center for Earth Systems Technology (JCET) and
Geography and Environmental Systems, UMBC
- 03:00-03:30 Coffee break
- 03:30-04:00
Dr. Margaret Watts, Research Mathematician, and
Dr. Arthur Sherman, Research Mathematician,
Laboratory of Biological Modeling,
National Institutes of Health, NIDDK
- 04:00-04:30
Dr. Brian R. Smith, Program Manager, Monitoring Integration, Resource Assessment Service,
Maryland Department of Natural Resources (DNR)
- 05:30-07:00
We had dinner with the clients at Paradise Indian Cuisine in Woodlawn.
We all learned some surprising things about all participants.
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Professional development workshop with Kathy Sutphin,
Assistant Dean of CNMS Wednesday, 07/02/14, 04:00pm-05:00pm
Kathy Sutphin, the Assistant Dean of the College of Natural and
Mathematical Sciences at UMBC, came to visit us and spoke about her
career path. She also talked about what a typical day looks like in
her job, which includes writing many grants for the school to fund
research. The main purpose of her visit was to introduce us to the
Annual UMBC Summer Undergraduate Research Fest (SURF), in which we
will all have a poster presentation at upon the conclusion of the
REU. She provided us with helpful information on what to expect
and how to prepare for SURF. We were given specific details about
the event schedule, how to register, and the abstract submission
deadline. Additionally, she advised us on general presentation
tips, such as how to write, review, and submit an abstract, along
with preparing the presentation and finally presenting research.
This information will help us all with not just the SURF
presentation, but also other scientific presentations we may
attend. We look forward to completing our research projects and
having the opportunity to present at the Summer Undergraduate
Research Fest.
-
Lauren Gomez
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VIP meeting with Dr. William LaCourse, Dean of CNMS
Tuesday, 07/08/14, 09:00am-09:30am
On Tuesday July 8th Dean of Natural and Mathematical Sciences,
Dr. William LaCourse addressed the group of HPC students regarding
the operations and responsibilities of his positions. While he
visited, he spoke about his previous interest and his experience at
UMBC. Dr. LaCourse has been at UMBC for over 20 years and plans to
continue to teach classes even as a Dean. He spoke with pride about
the intellectuality and breadth that the College of Natural and
Mathematical Sciences provides. In his tenure as Dean, he has
attempted to address numerous new teaching methodologies including
new open learning environments. This open environment learning style
has been coined Discovery and it encourages students to
act in a collaborative atmosphere. Dr LaCourse answered questions
from HPC students regarding his position and inspired students to
continue the important research. Dr LaCourse's chemistry
background and enthusiastic personality made his visit pleasurable,
entertaining and informative.
-
Julian Gilyard
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Professional development workshop with Dr. Janet Rutledge,
Vice Provost and Dean of the Graduate School
Thursday, 07/10/14, 04:00pm-05:00pm
As the Dean of the Graduate School at UMBC and as one whohas herself
attended graduate school, Janet C. Rutledge, Ph. D, was the ideal
personto speak to the members of the HPC REU at UMBC about Graduate
School andFellowship Applications. Dr. Rutledgeâs presentation
began with a question tothe students about the purpose of obtaining
oneâs B.S., M.S., and PhD, whichreally forced them to think about
the path they were taking and why they weretaking it. She mentioned
the difference between Graduate Degrees andProfessional Degrees and
emphasized that there are many different options fordegrees to pursue
after receiving oneâs B.S. The presentation then shifted itsfocus
to the application process. Dr. Rutledge discussed funding and the
differenttypes of funding that are available through the graduate
school that oneattends and through outside institutions. She spoke
about the differentcomponents of the application and emphasized that
the Statement of Purpose isthe most important aspect of the
application because of the control that theapplicant has over it.
Some helpful advice was also given on obtaining strong lettersof
recommendation. Dr. Rutledge also suggested that the students visit
theschools they want to apply to and to ensure that the school is a
good fit for theirinterests and style of learning. The students left
Dr. Rutledgeâs presentationwith a better idea of how to go about
choosing graduate schools to apply to andthe actual process of
applying to them.
-
Emily Jasien
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VIP meeting with Dr. Philip Rous, Provost of UMBC
Monday, 07/14/14, 09:00am-09:30am
Dr. Phillip Rous, the Provost of the University of Maryland Baltimore County paid
a visit to the participants of the high performance computing research experience
for undergraduates (HPC-REU) during the daily morning social activities. Dr. Rous
shared his path to becoming provost and his own experiences concerning research
in both his undergraduate and graduate careers. He also articulated on several points of
action that he believed was important for undergraduate researchers to pursue in
order to help prepare for graduate school and put themselves in optimal positions
to conduct significant and important studies faculty members they desire to work
with. Dr. Rous's sound advice spoke to us all, as we look to him as a person of
immense prestige.
-
Gerald Payton
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CIRC Workshop on the Intel Phi Accelerator by Intel
Monday, 07/15/14, 09:00am-04:00pm
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VIP meeting with Dr. Keith Harmon, Director of the Meyerhoff Scholars Program
Friday, 07/25/14, 09:00am-09:30am
Dr. Keith Harmon, the director of the Meyerhoff program at UMBC, paid a visit to the HPC REU during the morning social. After being
briefed on each team's project, Dr. Harmon discussed his career path. Dr. Harmon is a classically trained pianst, who knew he wanted to
be a professor. He attend graduate school at Indiana University, Bloomington, where he became a mentor in a program for minorities.
Through this program, he became very passionate about these types programs, and when a position became available in the Meyerhoff program
at UMBC, he hopped at the chance. The Meyerhoff program has high standards for its students, knowing that their students can achieve
these standards with the resources provided for them by the Meyerhoff program. The program provides a sense of community and support for
minority students, where there might not be any. This support has led numerous minority students to go on and complete graduate degrees
at some of the top ranking schools in the country. Through the Meyerhoff program, and other programs like it, Dr. Harmon hopes to
diversify the workforce to more accurately reflect the American population and generate more representation, especially in STEM
fields.
-
Abigail Gartrell
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Summer Undergraduate Research Fest (SURF)
Friday, 08/06/14, 09:00am-12:30pm
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