The ISTI System, Cluster, and Networking Summer School, 2009

The Summer school of 2009 was a great success: - Acceptance rate to the program, ~30% - All students participated in a showcase doing a poster presentation and short technical talk presenting their project. - Half of graduating students have received continued support either through DOE or DOD. - One of four teams received a poster award at the LANL annual student symposium - Another team got a poster accepted for the IEEE Cluster 2009 conference in New Orleans, Sep 2009

Summary:

Over the period of nine weeks, 12 students participated in the Computer System, Cluster, and Networking summer institute, organized annually by the New Mexico Consortium, and Los Alamos National Laboratory. The institute is housed in the Los Alamos National Security Education Center (NSEC) in the Information Science and Technology Institute. The main idea behind this institute is for the selected students to receive an opportunity to gain hands-on experience with high-end computer hardware and software, with the purpose of building a computer cluster, capable of scaling to potentially super-computer capacity. Though each teams cluster is fairly small, all principles applied are directly related to solving the same problems at a much larger scale. Once the student teams have built their cluster, they work on a roughly five week long project that they ultimately have to present at the LANL Student Symposium, and at an annual mini-showcase organized mainly for the LANL organizations that have a vested interest in these students.

The summer of 2009, was the third annual offering of the institute, and was without a doubt the most successful thus far. Students are exposed to lectures on topics regarding the computer system, and how it is maintained. After such a lecture, they will implement said solution on their own computer system. This has proven to be very effective, and also gives great experience to the students who are highly sought after by LANL organizations in need for qualified people. Over the three years, more than 75% of students that have exited the program, has in some way either accepted a position at LANL, or have at least gotten an offer for continued support.

The topics covered include but are not limited to software such as DNS, DHCP, NTP, NFS, Apache, and LDAP. On the hardware side the focus is on high performance interconnect networks such as Myrinet, Infiniband, and 10Gigabit Ethernet. Other miscellaneous topics such as machine room design, making cooling considerations, etc, are also touched upon. Guest lectures from LANL employees working with these specific topics, and tours of LANL facilities are also used to complement the lecture based instruction.

1. Participants: Jharrod Lafon, Senior, NMSU Ben Haynes, Sophomore, MTU John Herrera, Junior, NNMC Christian Romano, Senior, UNM Dane Gardner, Junior, CSM Jonathan Welters, Senior, MTU Paige Ashlynn, Junior, UNM-LA Ian Burns, Junior, NMT Chris Hoffman, Junior, MTU Matthew Dosanjh, Junior, UNM Graham van Heule, Junior, MTU William Pickett, Junior, NMT

Instructor: Andree Jacobson, Senior Lecturer, UNM TAs: Kim McCormick, LANL, DCS-4 and Katherine Nystrom, LANL, INST-OFF

For more information, visit http://institutes.lanl.gov/isti/summer-school/

Contact: Prof. A. Jacobson, andree@unm.edu