NCSI: Regional University Learner's Cohort

Status	Completed
Mentor Name	Jeremy Evert
Mentor's XSEDE Affiliation	Campus Champion
Mentor Has Been in XSEDE Community	4-5 years
Project Title	Regional University Learner's Cohort
Summary	Learning supercomputing by preparing for the state High Performance Computing Competition, learners will experience both parallel jobs and high throughput computing.
Job Description	Students will set up an account with one of the state supercomputing resource provers. Students will study the Traveling Salesperson problem and implement an algorithm to provide a solution in a programming language of their choice. Students will provide a parallel programming solution for solving the determinant of a large matrix. Students will present their learning path at the state research fair. Students will also reach out to a high school of their choice, offer to share their story with interested students, and offer to assist high school students in the state HPC competition.
Computational Resources	Students are asked to work with the open science grid while working with the Traveling Salesperson Problem. Students are asked to reach out to TACC, PSC, or Bridges to request an account to run parallel programming job.
Contribution to Community	This project will raise awareness of supercomputing in our state by presenting work at the state research fair. Students will also invite high schools in the state to participate in the state wide HPC competition. The students selected for the XSEDE EMPOWER program will also learn some of the fundamentals of programming, job scheduling, implementing and tuning algorithms, general parallel programming, and how to interface with both High Throughput Computing and Supercomputing resources.
Position Type	Learner
Training Plan	Date Topic Notes: 01/18/2021 Kickoff Meeting Pick meeting times and discuss goal 01/25/2021 Programming Start working with Java/Python/C programming (prints, variables, loops, selections, arrays) 02/01/2021 Programming Introduction to the Traveling Salesperson Problem(TSP) (Guess and Check) 02/08/2021 Programming TSP with Greedy 02/15/2021 Programming Ant Colony Optimization for TSP 02/22/2021 Programming TSP with Genetic Algorithm 03/01/2021 Presenting Prep for State Research Day (5 March 2021) 03/08/2021 Programming Tuning and comparing Algorithms 03/15/2021 Programming The Determinant Problem 03/22/2021 Programming Running jobs on the Open Science Grid. 03/29/2021 Programming OpenMP and NumPy 04/05/2021 Programming Slurm and Supercomputing 04/12/2021 Programming Message Passing Interface 04/19/2021 Preparation Final Preparation for State HPC Competition
Student Prerequisites/Conditions/Qualifications	A strong interest in either learning supercomputing, or a strong interest in programming, or a strong interest in completing a extra curricular activity, presenting work, and taking part in a state competition.
Duration	Semester
Start Date	01/18/2021
End Date	04/19/2021