OpenTopography & the UCSD Computational Research Experience for Undergraduates (CREU)

Oct 26, 2010

The San Diego Supercomputer Center at the University of California, San Diego, has announced a new and unique volunteer internship program for undergraduate students entitled Computational Research Experience for Undergraduates (CREU). As part of this program, students will be paired with an SDSC mentor and will work as part of a research team dedicated to a particular area of computational research. The OpenTopography team has submitted two projects to the CREU program:

    CloudStor: Data Intensive Computing on the Cloud
    Project Overview: The objective of the CloudStor group is to explore new strategies and technologies for data-intensive cloud computing; investigate application profiles that benefit from this paradigm; and, develop corresponding applications. The CloudStor group is interested in evaluating the performance and price/performance of alternative, dynamic strategies for provisioning data intensive applications based on parallel database systems versus Hadoop. Our studies will contribute towards the understanding of performance tradeoffs and feasibility in various provisioning strategies for serving large scientific data sets. A possible outcome is a reassessment of how data archives are implemented and how data sets are served to a broad user community using on-demand and dynamic approaches for provisioning data sets, as opposed to the current static approach.
    Project Mentor: Dr. Chaitanya Baru and Dr. Sriram Krishnan, San Diego Supercomputer Center, UCSD
    [detailed project overview - PDF]

    OpenTopography: A Portal to High Resolution Topography Data & Tools
    Project Overview: We seek CREU students to work as part of the National Science Foundation-funded OpenTopography Facility (http://www.opentopography.org) hosted at the San Diego Supercomputer Center (SDSC). OpenTopography has developed a cyberinfrastructure- based solution to enable online access to Earth science-oriented high-resolution LIDAR topography data, online processing tools, and derivative products. High-resolution topography data acquired with LIDAR (Light Detection and Ranging) remote sensing technology have emerged as a fundamental tool for Earth science research. Because these acquisitions are often undertaken with federal and state funds at significant cost, it is important to maximize the impact of the data by providing online access to a range of potential users. Leveraging high performance computational and data storage resources available at SDSC, OpenTopography provides access to terabytes of point cloud data, standard digital elevation models, and Google Earth image data, all co-located with computational resources for higher-level data processing.
    Project Mentors: Dr. Chaitanya Baru and Christopher Crosby, San Diego Supercomputer Center, UCSD
    [detailed project overview - PDF]

Details:
For more information on the CREU program and the 18 research opportunities available, please see the UCSD Computational Research Experience for Undergraduates (CREU) website

All applications must be submitted via US Mail and postmarked no later than November 27, 2010.

San Diego Supercomputer Center, UC San Diego
January 10 - March 18, 2011 (ten weeks)
Internship hours will be coordinated with your mentor and can range from 10 - 15 hours per week.