The Blue Waters project, managed by the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) at the University of Illinois, recently announced a unique fellowship program for doctoral students who can use the Blue Waters computing system to help complete their academic research. This may be the only National Science Foundation project that funds this type of opportunity. The Ohio Supercomputer Center is under contract with NCSA to manage the fellowship program.
Up to seven fellows will be selected by the spring of 2014 to receive a generous award: a $38,000 stipend, a $12,000 tuition allowance, up to 100,000 node hours on the Blue Waters System and travel expenses to attend a Blue Waters Symposium and one other professional conference.
The program does not focus on any particular discipline, but instead is intended for Ph.D. researchers from any field where large-scale modeling, data analysis and visualization can provide insights into their research problem. This could include students from the engineering, physical and natural sciences, social sciences or even the humanities.
Traditional uses of large-scale computing systems have helped to address a wide range of scientific and engineering challenges, including, for example, the human, plant and animal genomes, an understanding of molecular chemistry, climate change, the design of nano-devices, the discovery of new materials and a wide range of industrial design and production system problems. Newer applications have simulated the behavior of markets and designed systems for identifying, analyzing, and archiving video libraries.
It is expected that the Blue Waters Fellows will follow in these traditions to make significant contributions to their field of study.
The application deadline is Feb. 3, 2014. More information about the fellowship can be found at: https://bluewaters.ncsa.illinois.edu/fellowships.
