Student Program

From Education

Contents 1 Committee 2 Current Vision of Student Days 3 Committee Member Action Items 4 Things asked of the Speakers, Panelists, and RoundTableMeisters 5 Suggested Sessions 5.1 Panel Discussions: 5.2 Roundtables 5.3 Individual Talks: 6 Calendar of Events (and place to signup) 6.1 Calendar at a Glance 6.2 Session Descriptions 6.2.1 Monday Nov 12 6.2.2 Tuesday Nov 13 6.2.3 Wednesday Nov 14 6.2.4 Thursday Nov 15 7 Other Action Items 7.1 Contacting folks from Industry 7.1.1 What is needed 7.1.2 Talking points for phone call 7.1.3 Outreach email

Committee

Co-Chairs

Tom Murphy and Kristina Wanous

Subcommittee members

Anthony E. Baylis, Jesse Bemley, Bonnie Bracey, Dominique Foley, Barry Goldman, Rozeanne Steckler, Edee Wiziecki

Student Advisory Group

Camille Frazier, Dylan Gorman, Kevin Hunter, Alex Leman, Jude Onwuemeka

If others are interested in joining the Student Program subcommittee or the Student Advisory Group, please contact Tom Murphy (tmurphy@contracosta.edu) or Kristina Wanous (kwanous@uni.edu)

Current Vision of Student Days

Tour of Conference Floor 

Students get an overview of the whats and whys of a SC Conference floor and a guided tour of the conference floor. Goal of this orientation is so students will be able to more fully benefit from all they see and here, i.e. the conference floor is more than just chachkis. Details are being worked out.

Presentations, Roundtables, and Panels

Current plan is to have 19 hour-long slots: noon to 4pm on Tuesday November 13, and 10-4pm on Wednesday and Thursday. This is after the Education Program ends, which should allow Education Program leadership to help present, as well as to match the availability of the student volunteers whom comprise the majority of the student attendees. There should be sufficient slots to match people's availabilities; we can run parallel sessions as necessary, though space will be an issue.

Collaboration with Student Volunteer Program

Students' first priority is to the volunteer program. We are working with the volunteer program to allow students to trade shifts so they can attend desired sessions.

Collaboration with Student Competition

The Student Competition will be over before presentations start, but registered Student Day participants will be asked to participate in the Competition as part of membership in the Student Days.

Committee Member Action Items

Recruit

presenters and panel members for the sessions below

Locate

a sponsor ($750) so we can print tee-shirts for students and Student Days Volunteers. These shirts will be used as "tickets" when we get early access to the conference floor.

It would also be good to solicit Student Days chachkis we can use to spark attendance at sessions.

Embellish

Help migrate the current vision and plans for Student Days to be the final version of Student Days. We can schedule conference calls as needed.

Volunteer

to claim one of the presentation slots, define the type of presentation, and declare the topic.

Things asked of the Speakers, Panelists, and RoundTableMeisters

Know

You only need to be knowledgeable about your area. It is ok to say "well, I don't know, but my best guess is", or "I don't know, but I know who does", or just "I don't know" about your area. It is also ok to say "well, I don't know, but my best guess is", or "I don't know, but I know who does", or just "I don't know".

Share

Be willing to share your experiences, war stories, and best practices, i.e. all the stuff you learned the hard way that would have made your life a lot easier

Do

The most important thing is to make yourself available to students. You don't have to be the best in your field, heck you don't even have to have a field. All you need is the desire to help and then to make the decision to jump in.

Prepare

as little or as much preparation as you find necessary is exactly what is needed. We can help get copies made. There will be a projector and a PC of some flavor in the room, so bringing a flash drive will suffice, though you can certainly jack into the AV stream using your own laptop.

Breathe

It will likely be an enervating experience. Allow 10-15 minutes for questions and answers and 5-10 minutes for after the presentation individual interactions. Don't worry if your presentation morphs into a roundtable or if either of them morph into a panel discussion. It's all good.

You can sign up by editing the "calendar at a glance" and the corresponding "session description" areas below.

Suggested Sessions

Panel Discussions:

• Employer round panel discussion: find employers looking for people to do work in HPC fields. Coordinate their discussion talking about what the employers are looking for, what internships are available, and where good places to get started in an HPC career are. This talk should last about an hour.
  • Organizer:
• Student researcher panel discussion: find graduate students to talk about their research and their graduate school experiences. Coordinate their discussion centering around how they selected a graduate school, what was involved in the process, how they selected their advisors, and what sort of research they are current involved in. This panel discussion should last about an hour.
  • Organizer:
  • Stephen Nash (Engineering) would like the students in the pilot HPC internship program with SDSC to report on their research experience and results at a national meeting. He would like to make this a part of the Sc07 program. These will be graduate students, not undergrads, but they will have something to add to our program for undergraduate faculty and students.

Roundtables

• National Lab round table: Contact representatives from the national labs that will be attending supercomputing (Argonne, Oak Ridge, etc.). Coordinate their discussion with information about the national labs, what sort of internships they offer, employment opportunities of the labs, research going on at the national labs, and how the individuals became involved in the labs. This should be about an hour.
  • Organizer:

Individual Talks:

• Successful interviewing techniques - give (or find someone to give) a talk about successful interviewing techniques and what to expect when going in for an interview. Talk about everything from wardrobe and posture to practice questions. Possibly have some sample interview questions and excellent answers for them to consider.
  • Organizer:
• Building a resume - give (or find someone to give) a presentation about resumes: everything from what activities help to build a resume to format of a resume and what to include, particularly for employers in HPC areas.
  • Organizer:
• Job search - give (or find someone to give) a presentation about looking for jobs: what to expect after graduation and how to look for and apply to HPC careers.
  • Organizer:
• Applying to graduate school - give (or find someone to give) a presentation about applying for and selected a graduate school. Talk about the process involved as well as the materials involved (briefly resume and statement of purpose).
  • Organizer:

Calendar of Events (and place to signup)

Times yet to be determined:

• Diane Baxter - Graduate School Survival Skills (if she comes to the conference)
• Bonnie Bracey Sutton - Interview techniques

Calendar at a Glance

This space intentionally left blank	Monday Nov 12	Tuesday Nov 13	Wednesday Nov 14	Thursday Nov 15
7:00 - 8:30	Full Buffet Breakfast (D1-2-3)	Full Buffet Breakfast (D1-2-3)	sleep	sleep
8:30 - 10:00	Empowering students as computational science professionals (also start of SC07 student competition 8:30am-5pm)	SC07 Conference Keynote Address
10:00 - 10:30	break	break	Supercomputing in plain English - Overview	TeraGrid Student Competitions
10:30 - 11:00	Parallel Hands-On Sessions (group 1)
11:00 - 12:00		Blue Collar Computing	Internships at Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center and beyond	Great Stuff from Intel
12:00 - 1:00	Lunch (D1-2-3)	Lunch (D1-2-3)	eat	eat
1:00 - 1:30			HPC Tuning & Parallel Computing in Plain English
1:30 - 2:00	Parallel Hands-On Sessions (group 1 continued )	Parallel Hands-On Sessions (group 3)
2:00 - 3:00			HPC Hardware and Performance Tuning
3:00 - 3:30	break	break	Anatomy of a LittleFe	The ACME opportunity
3:30 - 4:00	Parallel hands-on Sessions (group 2)	Mysteries of the Conference Floor Explained
4:00 - 5:00			The TeraGrid, its staff, and student opportunities
5:00 - 6:00	Computational Science, A better Model for Science Education?	BOF	eat	eat

Session Descriptions

Monday Nov 12

8:30am-9:30am Empowering students as computational science professional(Keynote in E1-2-3)

(Angela Shiflet)

8:30am-5pm SC07 student competition (Challenge)

(Paul Gray)
For more information http://www.sc-education.org/conference/studentcompetition.php

9:30am-10am SC07 Conference Highlights (Presentation in E1-2-3)

• Tech Program (Harvey Wasserman)
• Exhibits (Cherri Pancake)
• Broader Engagement (Jennifer Teig von Hoffman)
• SCinet (Jackie Kern)

10:30am-12pm and 1:30pm-3pm Parallel hands-on Sessions (lab in D4|D5|D6|D7|D9|D10)

• Biology (Jeff Krause and Eric Marland)
• Chemistry (Shawn Sendinger, Clyde Metz)
• Physics (Dave Joiner and Rubin Landau)
• Computer Science (Charlie Peck, Tom Murphy)
• Humanities, Arts and Social Science (Vernon Burton, Steve Beck, Andy Beveridge)
• Mathematics (Angela Shiflet, Bob Panoff)

3:30pm-5pm Parallel hands-on Sessions (lab in D4|D5|D6|D7|D9|D10)

• Intel/Total View parallel programming environments (Charlie Peck, Tom Murphy)
• Science Gateways (Nancy Wilkins-Diehr)
• Web Services 2.0 (Geoffrey Fox)
• Matlab tutorial (Mathworks)
• Condor (Renato Figueiredo, Henry Neeman)
• Getting started using TeraGrid resources (Jay Boisseau)

5pm-6pm Computational Science, A better Model for Science Education? (Panel)

(Rubin Landau, Angela Shiflet, Jose Munoz, Bob Panoff, Brent Gorda, Yan Xu, Tom Murphy, et al)

A free-wheeling discussion to gravitate towards a definition of computational science education, why it should be taught, whether it is a better model for science education than the traditional ones, and how it may be incorporated into an already-full curriculum. The audience is a valued member of panel with additional input from those in the trenches.

Tuesday Nov 13

8:30am-10am SC07 Conference Keynote Address (keynote)

(Neil Gershenfeld) Programming Bits and Atoms

11am-12pm Blue Collar Computing (Presentation)

1:30pm-3pm Parallel hands-on Sessions (lab in D4|D5|D6|D7|D9|D10)

• HPC University resources (Laura McGinnis, Mary Ann Leung) , and CSERD--NSDL resources (Bob Panoff)
• BCCD (Dave Joiner)
• Getting started using Open Science Grid resources (Mike Wilde, Alina Bejan, Ben Clifford)
• Collaboration tools - wiki, moodle, etc. (Charlie Peck, Kevin Hunter)

3:30pm-5pm Mysteries of the Conference Floor Explained (Presentation in D7 and on conference floor)

(Scott Lathrop, Dave Cooper, Tom Murphy and Kristina Wanous) Overview of the conference floor:

• nomenclature: faculty, students, suits, salesfolk, entrepeneurs, boothbabes and boothdudes, typical unique hardware, typical unique network fabric, typical unique software, and chachkis.
• events of the floor: vendor presentations, vendor spiels, student presentations, magic acts, off-the-conference-floor-technical-presentations.
  

See the controled chaos of the conference floor first hand to interpret broo-ha-ha and the people milling about as new things to consider learning.

Wednesday Nov 14

10am-11am Supercomputing in plain English - Overview (Presentation in D7)

(Henry Neeman)

11am-12pm Internships at Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center and beyond (Presentation in D7)

(Laura McGinnis)

1pm-2pm HPC Tuning & Parallel Computing in Plain English (Presentation in D7)

(Paul Gray)
If history be our guide, today's high-performance computing (HPC) hardware and software will be on desktop machines in less than a decade, and so now's a good time to learn about about using them. Depending on the coverage of the previous talk, we may start with some concrete exercises that explore how a high-performance computer's memory and central processor design affects program execution. We then will examine parallel computers, both their promise and their shortcomings, from a practitioner's point of view. Some non-detailed examples of the use of the Message Passing Interface (MPI) package will aim to demonstrate the basic concepts behind this very popular form of parallel computing.

2pm-3pm HPC Hardware and Performance Tuning (Presentation in D7)

(Paul Gray)

Learn the mysteries of HPC performance through exploring PAPI (Performance Application Programming Interface), PerfMon (Performance Monitor), and gprof (GNU profiler). PAPI aims to provide the tool designer and application engineer with a consistent interface and methodology for use of the performance counter hardware found in most major microprocessors. PerfMon is a simple but very usable performance monitoring tool for network elements like routers and switches. gprof helps determine which parts of a program are taking most of the execution time.

3pm-4pm Anatomy of a LittleFe (Presentation in D7)

(Charlie Peck)
All the details related to the design and construction of a LittleFe. What's it made of? How does it work? How can I make my own?

4pm-5pm The TeraGrid, its staff, and student opportunities (Panel) in D7

(Nancy Wilkins-Diehr of SDSC- Moderator, Kelly Gaither of TACC, Scott Lathrop of ANL, Shaun Brown of PSC, Craig Stewart of IU, Ray Sheppard of Indiana U, Krishna Muriki of SDSC, Laura McGuinnis of PSC, Diglio Simoni of RTI, Randy Heiland of Indiana U, Michael Oberg of UCAR, Daniel S. Katz of ISU, Conrad Steenberg of CalTech and Gabrielle Allen of LSU)
The TeraGrid is one of the flagship programs of the National Science Foundation's Office of Cyberinfrastructure. Come hear about the program from a panel of staffers from throughout the project. We will talk about our day-to-day activities, what training and education lead us to where we are now and student opportunities that are available at our institutions. Please join us!

Thursday Nov 15

10am-11am Teragrid Student Competitions (Presentation in D7)

(Jesse Bemley and Paul Gray)
Overview of the requirements of the three student competitions held at TeraGrid. There are seven categories (high school thru graduate) spread across the competitions. So come to see how you can participate to win money, ipods, and crystal awards. Meet the students who won the prizes.

11pm-12pm Great Stuff from Intel (Presentation)

(Steven Wheat)

3pm-4pm The ACME opportunity (Panel in D7)

(Kristina Wanous, Tom Murphy, et al)
In general, this is about recognizing ways to collaborate with faculty and the benefits of these collaborations. In particular, it is about your opportunity to collaborate with the ACME effort

advancing Computational Science Education. ACME is the LittleFe (portable educational cluster) hardware effort, the BCCD (bootable cluster CD) software effort, and the CSERD (Computational Science Education REference Desk) curricular effort. Note that his Student Days program, and the larger SC07 Educational Program, are powered by ACME folk.

Other Action Items

To do:

• handouts from the schools and labs (see section below)
• speakers from industry (see section below)
• Need additional speakers for specific student needs, such as how to
  • write a good resume
  • handle yourself in an interview
  • apply for grad school
  • apply for an internship

Contacting folks from Industry

What is needed

We have a list of the 200+ SC07 vendors. Some of them will be willing to speak during student days. We just have to locate them. Right now we need the student days committe to take their portion of the SC07 vendors and sift though them. Please let us know if you are able to this.

We have names and phone numbers, hence the suggested talking points below. You may also be able to track down an email adress, hence the suggested email below.

You will have noted our use of "suggested". Please also help us tune the words of the talking points and email.

Talking points for phone call

• what we need. Speakers for Student Days

• who we are
  • program geared for the undergraduate and graduate students attending the SC07 conference
  • committee of people working towards gathering people to speak from academia, industry, and research
  • looking for speakers and representation
• what we are looking for
  • handouts - internships, job opportunities geared towards students, pamphlets about grad schools
  • speakers - speak about your institution, personal experience, or student topic (resumes, job interviews, etc.)

Outreach email

Scott Lathrop, the chair of the SC07 Education Program, recommended we talk with you as one of the exhibitors for this year's SC07 Conference.

I am a member of the SC07 Students Days effort, seeking to provide info and advice to college undergraduates ease them into computational science and high performance computing careers. As part of this, we're looking for presenters to provide information and experiential anecdotes.

Please consider signing up for one of the hour long time slots, which run from 10 am to 4 pm on Monday, November 12th through Thursday, November 15th. Possible topics include

• factors leading to success
• possible career opportunities and the knowledge/experience necessary to get there
• how to interview well
• how to create and/or tweak a resume - or, what employers/researchers/grad schools are looking for
• an overview of your corner of the HPC world
• other topics of merit

We're also looking for handouts from graduate schools, and organizations that offer careers and internships in HPC-related fields. SC giveaways would also help further entice students to attend.

Thank you for your consideration,