Interns Super-Compute in the Arctic

Submitted by Jenn Wagaman
Phone: (907) 474-6551
08/12/03

Five students, who traveled across the country to learn about supercomputing in the arctic, are gearing-up for their final presentations this week. The students have spent the past ten weeks learning the ins and outs of supercomputing and high-end visualization. They will each give a presentation on Thursday to demonstrate what they learned this summer.

The interns came to the Arctic Region Supercomputing Center (ARSC) as part of the Alaska Research Summer Challenge, an NSF-funded intern program for undergraduate students. Interns live on the University of Alaska Fairbanks campus and work at the center with an individual mentor. In addition, they participate in weekly events with other NSF science-focused interns on campus. Betty Studebaker is the intern program manager at ARSC.

This year’s interns come from several universities across the country, including Bowie State University, Norfolk State University, New Mexico Institute of Mining and Technology at Socorro and the University of Texas at El Paso.

"I feel like I learned a lot," said Ameerah Muhammad a computer science junior at Bowie State University, who spent her summer working on the Body Language User Interface and learning to program virtual reality. "My school doesn’t offer any kind of graphical programs so I thought it would be cool to come out to Alaska and learn about it."

This year’s interns completed varied projects over their weeks at the center, including working with Landsat imagery data, creating three-dimensional prints, expanding an ionospheric modeling project and studying data base creation.

All five ARSC interns will give their final presentations on Thursday, August 14, 2003, in the Board of Regents conference room in the Butrovich building on the UAF campus at 2 p.m.

CONTACT: ARSC Public Affairs Coordinator Jenn Wagaman, (907) 474-6551, wagaman@arsc.edu ARSC news releases are also available on the Web at http://www.arsc.edu/