NCSI: HPC Student Intern Opportunity

Status	Completed
Mentor Name	Dana Brunson
Mentor's XSEDE Affiliation	Campus Champion & XSEDE Campus Engagement Co-manager
Mentor Has Been in XSEDE Community	4-5 years
Project Title	HPC Student Intern Opportunity
Summary	This student intern position will initially learn various roles in the Oklahoma State University High Performance Computing Center, while also contributing to the team to support computational and data-intensive research. The student will learn about the research computing profession and get hands-on professional skills that will help with any future computational research or role she aspires to. Depending on interests and aspirations, the intern may focus and learn one aspect of HPC more intensively or work directly with the research community on domain projects (after learning more about it.)
Job Description	Development of duties will eventually depend on the students interests and capabilities. Initially, the student will systematically review new user documentation and attend research computing training sessions. While reviewing the documentation, student will take note of errors and anything confusing and work with HPC staff to improve the documentation. By doing this, the intern will develop the ability to also help new users learn to use the systems (both traditional HPC, virtual environments, and data transfer mechanisms.) During this time, student may also help staff with hardware replacement to gain experience (and have fun) with the computers themselves. Depending on the students interests and capabilities, activities may include: working with researchers directly on projects, user support, analyzing logs about usage of systems, changing out hardware, etc. These activities will all happen with direct mentoring from the primary mentor and other HPC staff members (who are very excited about the opportunity!) The student may also participate in XSEDE training sessions and materials to augment the hands-on activities locally. By the end of the spring semester, we expect the student will have advanced enough to choose a focus and learn more advanced aspects of that role in supporting research computing.
Computational Resources	The student intern will benefit from a variety of the XSEDE training resources. Initially, the focus will be on learning about the campus HPC resources and expand to learning more about XSEDE resources later in the spring or during a following semester. Initially, the idea will be to learn when to use local or national resources -- and to learn about the plethora of external resources available.
Contribution to Community
Position Type	Learner
Training Plan	As described above, the initial training will be for the student to work through (and help identify confusing areas) of the user documentation. The student that we are submitting this application for has a bit of experience using Linux, servers, networking. We are following student internship practices from University of Utah's extensive internship program and from Dirk Colbry's paper "Engaging Undergrads in HPC". We will also use the materials from our undergraduate HPC class that uses "Carpentry-style" pedagogy to teach HPC fundamentals and appreciation for the science HPC can enable. The initial goal will be to develop understanding of the reasons research uses HPC and go through some "case studies" of how researchers use HPC. This will be interspersed with shadowing some of the HPC staff to learn what their jobs entail and to help when possible. By the end of the semester, the student will have learned about the research computing profession and hopefully decide to continue on with an apprenticeship.
Student Prerequisites/Conditions/Qualifications	I'm also serving as Beth's mentor for the Oklahoma LSAMP program and hoping that the XSEDE Empower program provides extra benefits to her financially so that she can spend more time on campus learning these professional skills.
Duration	Semester
Start Date	01/15/2019
End Date	06/01/2019