AAS Member Selected as 2016-2017 Blue Waters Graduate Fellow

This post is adapted from a National Center for Supercomputing Applications press release.

A group of 10 outstanding computational science PhD students from across the country have been selected to receive Blue Waters Graduate Fellowships for 2016-2017. The fellowship program, now in its third year, provides substantial support and the opportunity to leverage the petascale power of National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) at the University of Illinois’s Blue Waters supercomputer to advance their research. The awards are made to outstanding PhD graduate students who have decided to incorporate high performance computing and data analysis into their research.

"This highly competitive program is a great way for new researchers to explore complex scientific problems they may not otherwise be able to incorporate into their research. Access to funding, Blue Waters, and point of contact expertise will provide these fellows with the opportunity to accelerate their investigations and expand their research goals. Who knows, maybe they will even graduate sooner," says Bill Kramer, Blue Waters director. "The Blue Waters Graduate Fellowship program has proven to be extremely valuable to the previous two cohorts of fellows and I am excited to see what this third cohort will accomplish."

The 2016-2017 Fellows include AAS Junior Member Sherwood Richers, a graduate student at the California Institute of Technology. He will use Blue Waters to carry out direct Monte Carlo simulations of the neutrino transport problems in 3D core collapse supernova and neutron star merger simulations. See the rest of this group of fellows on the Blue Waters website. The fellows will receive a year of support to advance their research, including a tuition allowance and a substantial stipend, an allocation on Blue Waters, and funds to support travel to the annual Blue Waters Symposium. In three years, this fellowship program will have awarded more than $1.3 million and over 50 million core equivalent hours to support graduate research.

Blue Waters is one of the most powerful supercomputers in the world, and is the fastest supercomputer on a university campus, with more aggregate memory and data capabilities than any other openly available resource. Scientists and engineers across the country use the computing and data power of Blue Waters to tackle a wide range of challenging problems, from predicting the behavior of complex biological systems to simulating the evolution of the cosmos. Blue Waters is supported by the National Science Foundation (NSF) and the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) at the University of Illinois.

The next call for applications for the Blue Waters Graduate Fellowship program will be in the fall of 2016.